It’s a race to be the first billionaire in space! Richard Branson, founder and also billionaire of Virgin Galactic, has announced that he will be on the next Virgin Galactic flight, which is scheduled for July 11th. Richard said: “I’ve always been passionate about space exploration and am excited to begin my journey with Virgin Galactic.” If Richard Branson can beat Jeff Bezos by nine days, then he would become the very first person who has ever gone into space and became a billionaire.
Talking about his visit to space, Richard Branson in a statement said, “I truly believe that space belongs to all of us. After 17 years of research, engineering, and innovation, Virgin Galactic stands at the vanguard of a new commercial space industry poised to open the universe to humankind and change the world for good.” Also, “When we return, I will announce something very exciting to give more people a chance to become astronauts, because space does belong to us all,” said Richard.
As we said earlier in our blog posts, the war for space travel is on and most of the billionaires are planning to visit space as a competition.
Jeff Bezos space travel details:
In June, Amazon CEO and richest man in the world Jeff Bezos announced that he, along with his brother, would be flying into space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft on July 20th.
A History of Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson:
Virgin Galactic was founded in 2004 by Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, British entrepreneur, musician, author, knighted philanthropist, and politician. Virgin Galactic’s goals are to “revolutionize the future of air travel” with commercial flights into fully suborbital space. In order to achieve this goal, Richard has worked on developing two different types of vehicles for these flights: SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnightTwo (a large airplane).
In 2005 Richard was successfully able to make it into outer space as an experimental pilot aboard the second test flight of SpaceShipOne which he built himself after seeing people fly at his mother Eve’s restaurant when she was alive. This made him the first civilian in history to ever go up in a spaceship without any military or government affiliation.
It’s a race of billionaires in space, with Richard currently leading by nine days! Will Jeff Bezos overtake Richard? The world is watching these two titans go head-to-head in their quest to not only become the richest person alive but also get bragging rights as the first human being who has set foot outside Earth’s atmosphere since 1972 when this was done by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. It would make an interesting documentary film if they were both successful at launching.
