Virgin Galactic completed its first fully crewed mission yesterday with founder Richard Branson on board. The successful mission paved the way for others to book tickets to experience a similar flight, and one of those $250,000 tickets has been purchased by another billionaire and space company founder: Elon Musk.
As The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal reports, Virgin Galactic confirmed via a spokesperson that Musk has purchased a ticket, but it’s not clear where he is on the list and therefore how long he will have to wait before his flight. One thing is clear, though, he’ll be the third of the three billionaires who own their own space companies to travel outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. Branson has already done it and Jeff Bezos is set to be a passenger on Blue Origin’s first crewed mission scheduled for July 20.
Richard Branson and Elon Musk are friends, as confirmed by a Branson tweet yesterday, and there’s no reason for Musk to pass up the opportunity to travel into space even if it isn’t on his own equipment. SpaceX is focused on bigger things and has already achieved some impressive feats including trips to ISS, figuring out how to land rockets so they can be used again, and launching a network of Starlink satellites.
Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin seem to be the odd ones out here as Bloomberg points out. While Branson and Musk are friendly and clearly happy to support each other’s endeavors, last week Blue Origin referred to Virgin Galactic’s space craft as a “high altitude plane,” and stated in a tweet that, “From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name. For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line.”
