Virgin boss unveils space trips

BBC News ^ | 01/16/05

[KevinDavis]

Space tourism is less than three years away, Sir Richard Branson has claimed.

There are already 13,500 potential passengers for the £100,000 ($190,000) "Virgin Galactic spaceliner" trip, Sir Richard told the BBC.

The entrepreneur is having five "spaceliners" built in the US by the team which launched the SpaceShipOne rocket plane last year.

[KevinDavis]

Cool..

[KevinDavis]

[FreedomNeocon]

I friggin' LOVE this guy.

I think his 3yrs thing might be a bit ambitious for anything other than a parbolic sub-orbit up&down flight.

Though with BUSH saying he wants a moon-base operational by 2020 (as a stepping stone to Mars), I think an actual orbital trip could be consumer bound in 5-8.

[Arkie2]

Some guy is building an inflatable space station (I kid you not) and offering 50 million to the first team that can build an orbiter to take tourists to it. It's getting interesting!

[flitton]

Let us hope that the service is more like his airlines than his trains which are expensive, slow, randomly timetabled and with the least helpful staff I have ever found on British trains. Otherwise you will spend $190 thousand to go half way to your eventual destination when you will be asked to transfer to someone else's spaceship to complete your journey.

Other than that I'm looking forward to it!

[Free_at_last_-2001]

...than his trains which are expensive, slow, randomly timetabled and with the least helpful staff I have ever found on British trains. - Agreed!

[Brett66]

13,500 potential passengers

Sending thousands of ordinary people into space, now that's my idea of a space "program".

[KevinDavis]

If I had the money I sign up...

[Paradox]

Sir Richard Branson, this guy is great! He has vision and ambition, if he weren't English, he'd make a great American!

[af_vet_rr]

Though with BUSH saying he wants a moon-base operational by 2020 (as a stepping stone to Mars), I think an actual orbital trip could be consumer bound in 5-8.

I would be very surprised if the government/NASA did pull off a mission to the moon by 2020. With the leaps in technology in areas of computing, materials, and propulsion alone since we last set foot on the moon, the government should have already been on the moon and signing up colonists.

I think President Bush is just trying to please some government contractors and those of us who remember being amazed by the Apollo missions, and he's throwing a bone out there. The project will undergo mission creep, just as the Space Shuttle did, and the democrats and Republicans will end up either scaling it back in favor of other wastes of money, I mean government programs, or they'll make it so expensive that our kids will be paying for it for decades.

You said the most important word - consumer. I think the world of Burt Rutan (and his brother who did some amazing things of his own as well as writing one helluva book about his missions over Vietnam), but I'm glad to say it's not just him, Paul Allen, and Richard Branson. Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), along with many others are going full-bore, and they are putting their money where their mouth is. Bezos is in the process of building a spaceport in West Texas, others are continuing their design/testing work.

It's hard to comprehend that we are on the edge of something that could be bigger than anything this nation has done. My greatgrandkids could very well take space travel for granted.

[KevinDavis]

Did Richard Branson dropped out of high school??

[Hand em their arse]

Don't even want to venture to where my mind went reading the title of this thread....