New Space Race: Did Richard Branson really travel to ‘space’, and how the flight stacks up against Jeff Bezos’
Billionaire Richard Branson flew to the edge of the space on July 11 on a rocket ship ‘Unity’, his company, Virgin Galactic, has grown for about two decades.
Branson, almost 71 years, and five crew members of the space tourism reached an altitude of about 88 kilometers above the New Mexico desert in the United States. The height is enough for them to experience three-four minutes without weight and see the curvature of the earth before safely gliding back to the company’s Spaceport America facility.
“Seventeen years of hard work to tell us so far,” said Branson when he congratulated his team on unity, a slim white rocket ship.
The main destination of flight is to increase trust in Virgin Galactic as the company plans to start taking customers on short space travel from next year.
With this mission, Branson became the first person to reach space on his own space spacecraft and beat fellow billionaires and founders of Amazon Jeff Bezos at nine days.
However, many were asked – Do Branson really go into space?
Blue Origin, company spaced sub-orbital services owned by Bezos, is effectively claimed on July 9 that Space Galactic Virgin flight does not travel to a “defined” altitude as space.
In a series of tweets, blue origin said the ‘new Shepard’ spacecraft was designed to fly above the Kármán line.
The Kármán line is the limit between the Earth’s atmosphere and outside space as defined by Fédération Aéronakique Internationale. This is set at 100 km (62 miles) above the average sea level. According to the Bezos LED company, the room starts at a 100 km mark for “96 percent of the world population”.
Virgin Galactic said that the flight could soar in “almost” 3 lakh (57 miles) at altitude. It doesn’t touch the kármán line. However, it should be noted that this height is still higher than what is defined by NASA and the United States is defined as the point where the room starts – 50 miles above the average sea level.
Bezos has chosen July 20 as the launch date. This marks the 52nd anniversary of Apollo 11 Moon’s landing. He will be accompanied by space by his brother, Markus, a charity auction winner of $ 28 million, and Wally Funk, one of the last members of the Mercury 13 project, which was chosen as “honorable guest”.
Funk is one of the 13 women’s pilots who have passed the same test as the original Mercury 7 astronaut of NASA in the early 1960s. However, they are banned from space lights because they are women.
