Maverick billionaire Sir Richard Branson kicked off the space tourism industry yesterday by becoming the first person to fly into space on his winged rocket yesterday. He along with 5 crewmates from the Virgin Galactic division of the Virgin Group achieved this feat when they soared to 55 miles above the New Mexico desert.
The richest man in the world and founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos is also scheduled to go into space with the first official flight of Blue Origin, his own space company. The flight is scheduled to happen on July 20th. It is widely speculated that the main reason Sir Richard preponed his flight by 3 weeks so that he can beat Bezos.
The trips being provided by Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Bezos’s Blue Origin and Musk’s SpaceX are also different. While Virgin Galactic takes passengers up to a height of 80 kilometres, which is the line accepted by the USA as the start of space, Blue Origin will take passengers further past 100 kilometres or what is known as the Karman line. Both these trips are suborbital trips that are meant to provide the travellers with a few minutes of weightlessness followed by a sighting of the curvature of the earth.
The SpaceX flights on the other hand are orbital flights meant to take the passengers around the world in orbit and meant to last a few days, unlike the trips that are being provided by both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. The SpaceX trips will also be much more expensive and are set to start operations next year.
Many experts including Neil DeGrasse Tyson have contented that these trips cannot be considered “Space Travel” in their true sense and is more of the novelty of being in space for a few minutes. In essence, this is more like a joy ride at an amusement park rather than a full-blown trip to space. These trips last approximately 20 minutes with the “astronauts” experiencing almost 8 minutes of weightlessness.
The whole experience is not cheap with each passenger having to shell out between $200,000 to $250,000 per trip. Despite the price of the trip, Virgin Galactic has claimed that over 600 tickets have already been sold to celebrities and millionaires from over 60 countries.
This whole billionaire space race is not just limited to the Western Hemisphere. Billionaires in India are also warming up to the whole concept and have been closely following the developments around the world.
Our sources at Reliance Industries, home of the richest man in Asia, Mukesh Ambani is looking at options to enter the space race himself. With ISRO still in its nascent stages in terms of space travel, it has become obvious that there would need to be a fair bit of outside help bought in to help with JioSpace.
Read the full article at: http://thedailyvanilla.com/2021/07/12/after-sir-richard-branson-jeff-bezos-elon-musk-indian-billionaires-show-interest-in-space/