Space Ego Trip For The Super Rich

First in space! Billionaire Richard Bran son would like to announce this on the Sunday after the flight in his own rocket spaceship. Rival Jeff Bezos would have been beaten by a few days. But what does the ego trip of the super-rich bring to space tourism?

The space race of the men with the big ego and the bigger wallet is about to be decided - and the winner is very likely Richard Bran son, not Jeff Bezos. On Sunday, July 11th, 2021, Bran son, British entrepreneur and billionaire, wants to be the first to venture into space with his own spacecraft. He wants to enjoy weightlessness for a few minutes, he wants to land safely again, and he wants to be celebrated. But above all, he wants to wipe out his rival Bezos. Because he did not issue the ticket for his own space flight until July 20, 2021.

Both Bran son and Bezos have poured billions of dollars into their dream of spaceflight over the past few decades. They hope to finally enable regular tourist flights into space, also in order to earn money with their space companies in the future. For now, however, the question is who will be first in the billionaire race into space. Bran son is currently ahead.

If everything goes as planned, the 70-year-old will climb into a small rocket plane called Spaceship Two Unity on Sunday, around 3 p.m. German time. Unity will be suspended under a mother aircraft that will transport the spacecraft to an altitude of approximately 15 kilometres. There it disengages, ignites its rocket engine for a minute and follows a parabolic trajectory that should bring it to a height of over 80 kilometres. The excursion into weightlessness only takes a few minutes, then the passengers are pressed back into their seats with five times their body weight. Ten minutes later, Unity will land like an airplane at the launch site in New Mexico. Mission accomplished. Hopefully.

Eleven minutes of flight time for Bezos' New Shepard

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, relies on simpler and more robust technology if he wants to follow suit nine days later: A classic rocket, christened New Shepard, will catapult a space capsule into the air. The capsule is supposed to separate, also take a parabolic path, allow a good three minutes of weightlessness and finally land under parachutes in the desert of West Texas. Total flight time: about eleven minutes. It's a tried and tested, safe concept. Because whenever problems should arise with the rocket, the capsule could bring itself to safety with rescue engines and land thanks to its parachutes. So far, New Shepard has successfully completed 15 test flights - still without people on board.

Virgin Galactic's Spaceship Two, as Bran son called his space airline founded in 2004, has fewer samples to offer. Unity was able to make just three excursions into space between December 2018 and May 2021, with one serious structural damage occurring that almost led to a catastrophe. On another attempt, the rocket engine failed to fire properly. And the previous model, the Enterprise, even crashed in 2014. The copilot died.

Bran son's problem: Spaceship Two is a complex aircraft that has to be controlled manually by two pilots and hardly allows any errors. It goes back to the engineer Burt Rutan, an aviation legend. However, Rutan is also known for pushing the limits of what is technically feasible. That was already the case with the original model, the Spaceship One, which won the An-sari X-Prize in 2004 for the first all-flight of a privately developed spacecraft. At that time, the rocket plane had to reach a height of at least 100 kilometres - a brand that is viewed worldwide, especially by the Federation Aeronautical Internationale, which is responsible for aviation records, as the limit to space.

Where does space begin?

Unity, with two pilots and up to six passengers, does not reach such heights. Richard Bran son, who should originally only have been on board for a later test flight, is therefore orienting his astronaut dream to the definition of space customary in the USA. Space already begins there at an altitude of 50 miles, a good 80 kilometres - a difference that Jeff Bezos showed with relish before his flight from the camp of the ambitious Bran son. After all, the Amazon founder wants to climb to an altitude of more than 100 kilometres on July 20, 2021, the anniversary of the first moon landing, and thus - without question - penetrate into space.

Bezos also cut a better figure when it came to announcing his plan. On the same day that Richard Bran son announced that he would get into his spacecraft prematurely as "Astronaut 001" to "research the customer experience", Bezos surprised with a special gesture: In addition to his brother and a wealthy passenger who sold around Had offered $ 28 million for a seat, he invited Wally Funk to join him as a guest of honor. The 82-year-old pilot, a celebrity in the United States, was one of the Mercury 13, a group of women unofficially selected as possible astronauts, in the 1960s. But they never had a chance in the then male-dominated US space program.

Another attempt to get into space was also unsuccessful: Wally Funk had already bought a ticket for a space flight for the equivalent of around 170,000 dollars in 2010, but was repeatedly relocated by the travel agent. The ticket is from Virgin Galactic.