Over the past 50 years, no one but astronauts have been able to fly to space. This number has been limited to 560 people from NASA in the United States, as well as astronauts from Russia and the world over.
Traveling to space however, is now longer limited to astronauts.
Virgin Galactic will launch later in 2018 the first space commercial space voyage. Asharq Al-Awsat sat with Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides to discuss the future of space travel.
“As a kid I dreamed about going to space and I’m going to be flying on this vehicle. There’s this sort of basic human desire to understand what it’s like in space. As a kid, you look up into the night sky and you’re sort of thinking about what it would be like. You know, this is a starting step towards that,” he said.
“More broadly, this is all part of commercial space which is a huge business now. The global space industry is over $300 billion a year now. The commercial part of that is about $250 billion a year and it’s growing very rapidly. It’s a very fast-growing component of the economy both between launch vehicles and satellites and other applications. It’s a very exciting, dynamic market area to be a part of right now and you’re seeing a lot of investment flowing in and a lot of dynamic new ideas and new things. We’re really thinking about a lot of exciting new things in commercial space,” he added.
“We are starting with a winged-vehicle which is essentially a rocket plane. We use that same technologies that you would use to, you know, fly somewhere for the first fifty-thousand feet, so taking off it’s like a normal airplane and then when you’re landing it’s like an airplane landing on a runway,” he explained while explaining the technology behind the plane.
“The special part is in the middle where we use a rocket engine to get you into space and it’s a special technology that allows for safe reentry.”
Asked about the duration of flight, Whitesides replied: “From takeoff until landing, it’s about an hour and a half. From the time you saw them taking off to the time they landed, it was about an hour and a half, that’s the order of magnitude, sometimes maybe a bit longer.”
“Everyone will get a special suit, but it won’t be with the air pressure helmet. You get a special flight suit, but it won’t be a pressure suit. It’s like an airplane in the sense that you can move around the cabin with the pressure suit on.”
The passenger will get to experience weightlessness for about five minutes, he revealed to Asharq Al-Awsat
“We do a lot of science and research flights. NASA is a customer and they, for example, have bought a couple of flights where they’ll be flying their experiments and experiments from researchers all around the world. It’s not just for space tourists, it’s also for science and researchers because it allows a platform to access space very rapidly,” he went on to say.
Whitesides revealed that Virgin Galactic was aiming to launch first commercial flight around the end of the year.
“We’ve had 600 people put down deposits and many of those have been full deposit $250,000. So, it’s a huge market of people from all over the world who want to come. What’s exciting is that we have already over 50 different countries, including Saudi Arabia, in the customer pool. So that means we’re going to expand the number of countries that are involve in human space flight and it’ll be a very good business, but it will also be a very positive impact on the world as people get to see the planet from outside of the planet and look down on the planet,” he stressed.
The aircraft only takes six passengers at a time.
“I think we anticipate that it’s going to be a very profitable business and we think it will lead onward to other businesses down the road. Someday potentially high-speed point-to-point travel going from one continent to another,” stated Whitesides.
Moreover, he remarked that the United Arab Emirates has invested in the company. The original investment was in 2010 and then there was another one a little bit later and that was with a company called Abar which is now a part of Mubadala.
He also noted the visit paid in March by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, to Mojave.
“We’ve met with a variety of folks in the science and technology sectors in Saudi Arabia who are doing really great things in space and satellites and other areas,” Whitesides said.
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