Space agencies have been working on the future of space tourism and commercialization of space visits in the recent years. The Virgin Galactic organization has taken a step forward in the same genre while competing against companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin.
As reported by tempo.co, three major space-based organizations are competing against each other for the future of commercialized space exploration. The competition is between Blue Origin owned by Jeff Bezos, Virgin Galactic owned by Richard Branson and SpaceX owned by Elon Musk. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are the organizations that focus mostly on space tourism while SpaceX is greatly involved in space-based missions like a manned mission to Mars or colonization of the Red Planet.
The Virgin Galactic organization was founded in the year 2004 under the guidance of Richard Branson as the CEO. The space agency is well known for the SpaceShip Two which accidentally crashed in the year 2014 while killing a pilot. Later, the company started creating a reusable craft. The craft VSS Unity just completed its test for seventh glide last week as it landed in the vast desert land of Mojave in California, U.S.
The VSS Unity hitched a ride aboard the VMS Eve mothership and was dropped from a height of 50,000 feet while attaining the speed of Mach 0.9. Branson stated in a certain blog post by Virgin website that Mach 0.9 is the maximum attainable speed just before the motor inside the rocket ignites.
Virgin Galactic has planned space journeys in the latter half of the year 2018 which has already started receiving bookings from wealthy customers. Around 700 people have booked their seats so far for the journey with US$250,000 cost for one seat. Renowned celebrities such as Katy Perry and Brad Pitt have also booked themselves a seat on this journey to space.
The company Blue Origin has Jeff Bezos as the CEO who is also world’s wealthiest man and owner of Amazon. Jeff and his team of scientists and researchers are in the process of developing a combination of rocket and capsule that would help take people as well as payloads to the suborbital part of space. The company managed to launch a capsule in December which was without any crew. The capsule was carried aboard New Shepard 2.0 carrier rocket with test flight conducted at Blue Origin’s Corn Ranch spaceport located in western Texas in the United States.
Similar to the ideologies of Elon Musk, Bezos is planning to bring down the cost incurred in traveling to space but for now, the company is majorly occupied in developing suborbital flights to commercialize space visits by taking tourists along.
SpaceX was established in the year 2002 under CEO Elon Musk. It has been delivering satellites for various communication and government organizations by making trips to space. SpaceX also plans on bringing down the cost of space missions by using the rockets for multiple journeys. In the month of February 2017, the CEO stated that the company would make two space tourism trips to our lunar surface sometime in the year 2018. This would be the first mission to space with humans onboard for the purpose of tourism. The long-term goals for SpaceX are to colonize Mars by conducting a manned mission to the dusty Red Planet.