To start our series of company profiles, there’s none better than Virgin Galactic. Led by the charismatic Sir Richard Branson who built out his Virgin empire through a variety of different industries and ideas, they are planning to provide sub-orbital spaceflights to the paying public, along with suborbital space science missions and orbital launches of small satellites.
You can in fact reserve your ticket for a mere $20.000 here, with a full price of $200.000 – the ticket price will surely drop over time (although the wiki entry states it will go up to $250.000) but for now that trip into space will be mainly reserved for those millionaires (and billionaires – we don’t want to offend Donald Trump by calling him a millionaire) amongst us.
As the most prominent tenant of Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic is bound to lead humanity into a new era of space travel. We’ll all be bound to our screens and monitors when they launch the first commercial flight into sub-orbit, reminding us of the excitement of the first moon landing, and this will definitely not be a small step for man…
