The Federal Aviation Administration just granted Virgin Galactic a commercial spaceflight license, which is critical to the company’s success.
The opening of a “flight window” occurs on Sunday, July 11th. The Galactic crew will attempt to make the climb on that day, although it is possible that it will be postponed due to inclement weather or a technical fault.
If the flight takes place on that Sunday, Sir Richard will have beaten fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos to the punch in the sub-orbital space tourism race.
The founder of the online retail empire Amazon.com has sunk a fortune into his hobby of building rockets and has announced his own trip to the edge of space on 20 July.
He’s invited three individuals to join him in his New Shepard booster and capsule system: his brother Mark; a mystery person who paid $28m (£20m) at auction for a seat; and the famed female aviator Wally Funk.
Eighty-two-year old Funk trained to be an astronaut in the 1960s and will become the oldest ever spacefarer when she rockets to an altitude of 100km with Mr Bezos.
The Amazon man has yet to detail how he’ll sell tickets more generally for New Shepard, but this is his plan.
Sir Richard has clearly moved his first flight up in response to Mr Bezos naming the date for his inaugural mission. Only after that outing was Sir Richard supposed to strap himself in.
Throughout the 2000s, seven wealthy individuals paid to visit the International Space Station (ISS). But this adventurism, organised under the patronage of the Russian space agency, ceased in 2009.
Now, new initiatives abound, and some of these will be aiming much higher than the sub-orbital flights from Sir Richard and Jeff Bezos.
The Russians, too, are reprising their commercial flights to the ISS, and there are even those who want to launch private space stations for people to visit. Among these is Axiom, a company started by a former Nasa ISS programme manager.
