Blue Origin / Alamy Stock Photoīeyond these initial flights with their billionaire founders aboard, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin will be competing to take paying customers on suborbital flights. Bezos will be accompanied by his brother Mark Bezos, American aviator Wally Funk who was part of jettisoned programme to send women into space in the 1960s, and a fourth passenger who won the auction for the remaining seat with a winning bid of US$28 million (£20.1 million).Īmazon’s Jeff Bezos is set to travel into space later this month.
However, both Bezos and Musk have ambitious plans for space tourism, extending in the case of the latter to the moon and even Mars.īezos himself is due to launch into space on July 20 – 52 years since the first moon landing – aboard his company Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. In winning the first round of the space tourism race, Branson has – for now – eclipsed his fellow billionaires, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk, and has scored a major marketing coup. The company has plans to produce dozens of spacecraft in anticipation of increased passenger demand. This is welcome news for the 600 aspiring space tourists who have waited years since making their reservations at a reported price of $250,000 in the late noughties. Virgin Galactic plans to start commercial space tourism flights early next year. With an eye on the history books, Virgin Galactic immediately announced plans to advance Branson’s spaceflight aboard SpaceShipTwo to July 11, upstaging by nine days his rival billionaire Jeff Bezos’ planned trip into space. While the stock has been volatile in the meantime, it has rallied by around 50% since securing approval from the US Federal Aviation Authority last month to proceed with passenger flights. Virgin Galactic became the first commercial spaceflight company to list on the stock market in October 2019. The company has made substantial progress in recent years, achieving its first suborbital flight in December 2018. Founded in 2004 to provide paying customers a trip into suborbital space, the company has experienced many false dawns over the years with projected dates of flights proving overly optimistic and a major setback involving a fatal accident in 2014. Virgin Galactic’s success has not been an overnight one. While SpaceShipTwo did not reach the Kármán line – 62 miles altitude above Earth and often regarded of as the edge of outer space – the Federal Aviation Administration puts the dividing line lower, at 50 miles.