Richard Branson, the English business magnate, investor and philanthropist who created Virgin, has revealed that his Virgin Galactic project is only months away from getting him into space via their spacecraft named SpaceShipTwo. However, this isn’t going to be a one off, in fact, this is just the first step towards creating truly commercial space travel, and he’s not the only one trying to achieve this. Jeff Bezos‘ Blue Origin and Elon Musk‘s SpaceX are also on a similar paths although Branson thinks that its really between him and Jeff Bezos – the Amazon CEO, although he sounded quietly confident he will get off Earth first, claiming “We’re talking about months away, not years away — so it’s close,” while talking to BBC Radio 4.
Specifically, the 67-year-old stated that: “Elon is doing fantastically well getting cargo into space, and he’s building bigger and bigger rockets,” before addressing Jeff Bezos’ progress by saying “I think we’re both neck and neck as to who will put people into space first,” “Ultimately, we have to do it safely. It’s more a race with ourselves to make sure we have the craft that are safe to put people up there.”
On the topic of his own personal journey to space, he had this to say: “I’m going for fitness training, centrifuge and other training so that my body will hopefully cope well when I go to space.”
As for when specifically the launch date is set to take place, no dates have been released so I guess all we can do is wait and see.
