The New York Post opens with the Headline, “Richard Branson, on his Virgin Galactic rocket plane, becomes first billionaire to get to space.” As if that's the important part of the story.
I'm guessing that like many of you I watched the livestream this morning and saw the test flight. I had to mute Steven Colbert a bit, and the chatter was a bit too much gushing adoration, but it was interesting to watch in the sense of feeling like a milestone; feeling like it's the beginning of something long awaited.
The coverage started with Branson showing up at their facilities on a bike - no word that I've seen about whether he got out of an SUV and rode the bike the last few yards like Pete Buttigieg, or even the last few miles, but he didn't look sweaty. He was immediately taken to task by Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor, who could be heard saying “You’re late! Come on! Let’s get suited up.” The coverage focused on Branson, and they had him recorded reading a letter to his late mother that was touching, though.
Before the launch, Branson also [showed] a photo of himself with another billionaire space tourism entrepreneur, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was there to cheer him on.
...
“Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready,” Branson wrote on Twitter.
Bezos, the third mogul in the “billionaire space race,” wished Branson luck on Instagram.
“Wishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow. Best of luck!” he wrote.
Let's face it: missions like this are not about stretching technology's limits, nor about who the first rich tourist in space is - that record was set in 2001 by Dennis Tito. They're about lowering the threshold for ordinary folks like us. Right now, we can fly around the planet thousands of times the distance they flew vertically today for tiny fractions of what these missions cost or what the mission Blue Origin flies in nine days auctioned their spare seat for. When people can fly suborbital missions for what flights across the US cost today, it will a common vacation.
We just seem to be a step closer to that today.
This was what we were promised so long ago. Good to see it finally happening.
ReplyDeletePrevious billionaires in space: Dennis Tito, Charles Simonyi, Guy Laliberte, Anousheh Ansari…
ReplyDeleteThat's what I was thinking...
DeleteYes, he did it himself, but he doesn't add that qualifier. To me, it's sloppy like so much media recently. I also question call suborbital flights "space".
@ErisGuy,
ReplyDelete... none of whom used their own toolkit.
Even though these guys might be no where near the stature of, say, Howard Hughes, I still find it very satisfying in a way, seeing rich men underwrite their sense of vision and stick to it long enough to see it to fruition, and are brave enough to stake their own fate to its performance. They may have a bit of prima-donna in them, but who gives a crap? Look how far space technology has advanced in a few short years since its seeming suspended animation over the early part of this millenium.
ReplyDeleteAnd gosh - what a lumbering, monstrous, tottering dinosaur NASA seems, by comparison. They just can't compete on any kind of level. It's really too bad that Jerry Pournelle isn't around to provide some great commentary on all this.