Richard Branson
British billionaire Richard Branson is going for seven months to complete preparations for the flight into space on a spaceship developed by his company Virgin Galactic. About this businessman said in new York at the forum Global Synergy, reports TASS.
He explained that after three or four months tourist spacecraft SpaceShipTwo, which is currently undergoing final testing, will make a suborbital flight. “And then, I hope that in another three months I will go into space himself,” he said. Along with Branson to go into space may British physicist Stephen Hawking, the entrepreneur promised to bring.
Designed by Scaled Composites LLC, and built by The Spaceship Company for Virgin Galactic ordering the glider is designed to conduct tourist flights to a height of about a hundred kilometers to the border of the Earth’s atmosphere from space, but without access to its orbit. The cost of travel for each of the six passengers will be about 200 thousand dollars. Tickets are already booked about 800 people, including, in addition to Hawking, actress Angelina Jolie and singer Lady Gaga.
In September 2017, took a test flight model of the Unity of the spacecraft SpaceShipTwo. It was created by the company Branson’s Enterprise is the ship that crashed about one and a half years ago. One of the reasons of the accident it was called pilot error. After the model of the spacecraft was improved and changed the name. The external differences between Unity and Enterprise are almost there, but on a new vehicle model the number of functions automated.
The first manned flight over the desert in California, breaking the sound barrier, the machine Enterprise made in April 2013.