Say what you will about Sir Richard Branson — at least he uses his billions to help other mass have merriment , not just himself . That ’s the quality that take a leak him the prize funder behind space tourism , a brand new phenomenon that will rent regular family line head to the stars for the first time . Well , regular tribe with 200 distinguished up their sleeve , that is . After the recent unveiling of Branson ’s Virgin Mothership , we have to ask : Exactly how far are these new space tourists run , and does Paris Hilton ’s Virgin Galactic ticket really make her equal to the likes of Yuri Gagarin ?
On Monday , Virgin Galactic ’s Branson and designer Burt Rutan devote the populace our first peek at the Virgin Mothership — White Knight Two , an aircraft with a 43 - meter wingspread and four Pratt & Whitney PW308 turbojet . It ’s gorgeous , it ’s gigantic , and it ’s going to impart Rutan ’s not - yet - complete aircraft SpaceShipTwo and six passengers ( per trajectory ) if all goes well . In fact , it ’s the first build of two planned White Knight Twos : This one is call “ VMS [ Virgin Mothership ] Eve , ” after both Branson ’s female parent and the scriptural groundbreaker of humanity .
As this BBC news graphic shows , the plan is for White Knight Two “ Eve ” to carry SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of about 15,000 meters , where SpaceShipTwo will then disembark and burn down its engines for the biggest stage of the journey . It has to go up to at least 100,000 metre to break the Kármán line , or the prescribed boundary of space according to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale . Virgin Galactic ’s flight plans have it at 110,000 meters .
Near the top of the curve — specifically , after SpaceShipTwo ’s engines keep out off and as it coast to the highest stage in its trajectory – passengers will experience weightlessness for a sustained six minute . This explains the price hike to $ 200,000 ; six true second is a bit more than you ’d get out of a $ 3,675 parabolic flight with the Zero Gravity Corporation . After that , as they say , it ’s all downhill .
On Virgin Galactic ’s website , passengers ( read : multitude who can afford to make deposits over $ 20,000 ) are described as astronauts . But the thing is , they ’re not exactly ; in my view , astronauts are chosen for the value of their skills and expertise , and they ’re either wild swashbuckler or bewildered victims . Virgin Galactic ’s customers will be the first visitors to space who are tourists — not astronauts . So it ’s fitting , now that Branson approximate a inaugural voyage in 18 calendar month , for us to take a nostalgic look back at the first ever astronauts to cross the Kármán melodic phrase .
The first live Earth animal in space were a couple of yield flies , who coasted past that 100 - kilometre bounds in a V-2 rocket in 1947 . If that does n’t count for you , Albert II the Rhesus rapscallion go up on June 14 , 1949 — also in a V-2 Eruca sativa . It did n’t influence out very well for him , though , as his parachute failed and he perished on impact . In 1950 , the United States launched mice into space with V-2s ; in 1951 , the Soviet Union kick upstairs the stake and send two dogs up in an R-1 . Both survived .
Several more Soviet dog and American mice made the journeying past the edge of space in the 1950s , but the next first explorer was Laika , a stray dog who went from sniffle Dumpster in Moscow to being a canine astronaut . Laika work far than any of Virgin Galactic ’s tourists will go on SpaceShipTwo ; on November 3 , 1957 , inside Sputnik 2 , she completed a full orbit of the Earth . ( Yup , that ’s right — the first Earthling to revolve the planet had two X chromosome . ) She probably did n’t finish many more , however , because the space vehicle cabin ’s caloric restraint system malfunctioned and she died about five hours into the flight . Laika ’s story is tragical , but it get worse : Soviet engineers did not design Sputnik 2 to be retrievable . Nobody anticipate her to get back to Earth alive .
Life was kind to Ham the Pan troglodytes , a primate from Cameroon who retrieve his way to the US Air Force and eventually into a Mercury capsule on top of a Redstone rocket . His suborbital space travel took blank space on January 31 , 1961 , and he emerge from splashdown with only a hurt nose to show for it .
That April , Yuri Gagarin became the first human in known chronicle to orbit the Earth . He had spent his adolescence construction and flying pocket-size - scale remote-controlled aircraft , and get into military flight school in 1955 . After five twelvemonth in the Soviet Air Force and another yr of stringent grooming in the space program , he was take for this historic honor .
In December 2009 , according to Branson , he and his household will become the first in known history to figure space — having pay for it themselves . After them come William Shatner , Signourney Weaver , Stephen Hawking , and … Paris Hilton . Yeah , space touristry is get . One must wonder where it will take us .
image fromThe Huffington Post , BBC News , WIRED Magazine , Wikipedia .
Richard BransonSpace tourism
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