Richard Branson will enter billionaire space tourism race TOMORROW when Virgin Galactic takes off

Richard Branson becomes the latest billionaire to enter the space tourism race, behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Branson’s Virgin Galactic is gearing up to send four people who paid $200,000 each at least 75,000 feet above the Earth’s surface on Thursday, marking the company’s first commercial flight.

However, Musk and Bezos have pushed paying customers to the final frontier over the past two years.

The ‘space barons’, with a combined net worth of $379.3 billion, vying for galactic supremacy – and only time will tell who will take the crown.

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson

Virgin Galactic takes a different approach to conquering space with an aircraft that attaches to a larger aircraft carrier and releases at a certain altitude.

Branson’s most high-profile and catastrophic space launch failure occurred in 2014, when Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed in California’s Mojave Desert, killing copilot Michael Alsbury and critically injuring pilot Peter Siebold.

The craft was conducting a manned test when it split into pieces.

Investigators later concluded that the crash was caused by a structural failure after Alsbury released a braking system prematurely.

Branson then said he was “shocked and saddened” by the “tragic loss.”

Two minor hiccups in 2016 involved attempts to perform the first glide flight for the company’s VSS Unity spaceplane.

Branson became the first billionaire in space when he made the maiden voyage of the VSS Unity on July 11, 2021.

The founder of Virgin Galactic was one of six Virgin Galactic employees aboard VSS Unity.

However, the spaceplane was grounded shortly after the flight due to an investigation when it went off course during its descent back to the runway in the New Mexico desert.

In September 2021, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it was investigating an anomaly in the flight’s descent.

The FAA, which oversees commercial air and spaceflight in the US, found that the spaceplane “deviated from air traffic control clearance” and did so for about a minute and 41 seconds.

Branson and his team have since solved the problem, sending a test crew of four crew members 54.2 miles above Earth’s surface in May, paving the way for Virgin Galactic’s first commercial mission, “Galactic 01” on Thursday.

The crew includes Colonel Walter Villadei, Pantaleone Carlucci, Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Landolfi and Colin Bennett, plus two Virgin Galactic employees who are also on the spaceplane.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk

Musk recently shared that his childhood love of science fiction inspired him to look beyond our planet, along with Sergey Korolev – an engineer who helped the Soviet Union beat the US in the race to space during the Cold War.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 and launched the Falcon 1 in 2006 and the first Falcon 9 in 2010, which was much less designed than competing rockets.

Musk’s reusable rockets were then used to transport the Dragon capsule to the International Space Station (ISS) to deliver cargo in 2012.

And it wasn’t until 2020 that SpaceX took its first humans aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

On May 30, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley lifted off from Cape Canaveral for the ISS — the first time in nearly a decade that a U.S. crew had been launched into space from U.S. soil.

The achievement propelled Musk into the private space exploration industry, allowing SpaceX to send Inspiration4 — a team of four civilians — into Earth orbit for three days in September 2021.

And SpaceX has six civilian astronauts with Aximos to the ISS.

SpaceX was awarded a $1.4 billion NASA contract in 2022 for five more astronaut launches to the ISS, an earlier one in 2021 for $178 million for “launch services” for the Europa Clipper mission en route to Jupiter.

And Musk’s company is also working on its Starship human landing system for the Artemis lunar mission.

SpaceX has also sent batches of 60 satellites into space to form its Starlink network, which has grown to more than 3,900 satellites with access to 1.5 million subscribers.

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 to pursue a childhood dream of spaceflight and build a society of millions of people living and working in space.

In a 1982 Miami Herald interview, after being named valedictorian of his high school, the then 18-year-old said he wanted to “build space hotels, amusement parks and colonies for two or three million people who would orbit the Earth.” are’.

“The whole idea is to preserve the Earth,” he told the newspaper … The goal was to be able to evacuate people. The planet would become a park.’

The idea of ​​Blue Origin came about in 1999 after Bezos saw the movie October Sky, a movie about a school kid who wanted to build rockets, and the aerospace company was born just a year later.

The company’s New Shepard rocket is named in honor of Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space.

It took Bezos’ company 15 years to make its first successful launch and landing of New Shepard — it had taken off and returned 21 times during that time.

On July 20, 2021, the billionaire, his brother Mark, Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen – the youngest person in space – and former NASA intern Wally Funk, 82, 66 miles above the Earth’s surface.

Blue Origin has since launched 27 people to the edge of space, including famed Star Trek celebrity William Shatner.

And Bezos’ company was aware of a $3.4 billion contract with NASA in May that brought him one small step closer to putting a man on the moon.

Blue Origin has been vague about the lunar lander proposal, aside from checking the name of its business partners: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, the spacecraft software company Draper and the robotics company Astrobotic.