It’s Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic vs Blue Origin of Jeff Bezos now as space race heats up
Billionaire Richard Branson will blast off to space on Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc’s test flight on July 11, days ahead of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ similar journey, his company has said. According to Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson would be a “mission specialist” aboard the SpaceShipTwo Unity, which will be launched from the launch site in New Mexico, “pending weather and technical checks.” Branson will be joined by Beth Moses, the company’s chief astronaut instructor, Colin Bennett, an operations engineer, and Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs.
“I truly believe that space belongs to all of us. Virgin Galactic stands at the vanguard of a new commercial space industry, which is set to open space to humankind and change the world for good,” Richard Branson said.
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Branson’s Virgin Galactic said he “will evaluate the private astronaut experience and will undergo the same training, preparation and flight as Virgin Galactic’s future astronauts.” Branson’s July 11 mission will be the twenty-second flight test for VSS Unity, the company’s fourth crewed spaceflight and the first to carry a full crew of two pilots and four “mission specialists.”
If the schedule holds, Branson will make it to the cosmos before Jeff Bezos, who said he would travel to space on July 20.
Virgin Galactic vs Blue Origin
Bezos is slated to fly to space along with his brother, Mark, trailblazing woman pilot Wally Funk and a so-far unidentified person, who shelled out $28 million to join the suborbital joyride, from West Texas aboard a rocket made by Blue Origin, the Amazon founder’s space company.
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The spacecraft developed by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are very different. Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft is not a classic rocket but rather a carrier airplane that reaches a high altitude and releases a smaller spacecraft, the VSS Unity. The VSS Unity fires its engines and reaches suborbital space before heading back to Earth.
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Blue Origin is more of a classic rocket experience—it has a vertical launch after which a capsule will separate from its booster, then spend four minutes at an altitude exceeding 60 miles (100 kilometres). And it is during this time that space travellers will experience weightlessness and can see the Earth’s curvature.
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The booster lands autonomously on a pad two miles from the launch site, and the capsule floats back to the surface with three large parachutes that slow it down to about a mile per hour when it lands.
Branson said in a blog post that after his space trip on July 11 he would “announce something very exciting to give more people the chance to become an astronaut.”
(With agency inputs)
