Virgin Galactic just reopened its waiting list to fly to space, and you can put your name down for a $1,000 deposit.
Through Virgin Galactic’s One Small Step Program, you can pay a refundable deposit to get in line for the next round of personal space travel. Your deposit gets you to the next level of the registration process called One Giant Leap, where you will be in the priority group for an offer of a future reservation once they become available.
While $1,000 is merely a drop in the bucket to reserve a seat to space, you’ll have to come up with more than $250,000 if you actually plan to follow through with Virgin Galactic’s One Small Step program.
Six hundred people secured confirmed spaceflight reservations when the first registration slots opened back in December 2018, and Virgin Galactic said the demand was so high, the company decided to release more seats.
“We have been greatly encouraged by the ongoing and increasing demand seen from around the world for personal spaceflight. One Small Step allows us to help qualify and build confidence in our direct sales pipeline, as well as to ensure that those who are most keen to make reservations, are able to do so at the earliest opportunity,” said Stephen Attenborough, Virgin Galactic’s Commercial Director, in the press release.
Virgin Galactic’s space tourism spacecraft, the SpaceShipTwo Unity, will take passengers for a 90-minute roundtrip into space 62 miles above the Earth. Passengers will experience breathtaking views of the Earth below, and even a brief period of weightlessness.
Digital Trends reached out to Virgin Galactic to find out a timeline of when people who sign up today could expect to fly to space. We will update this story when we hear back.
Aside from Virgin Galactic, SpaceX is also working on public space tourism with Space Adventures missions set for late 2021 or mid-2022. The Space Adventures missions will consist of up to five days free-orbiting in space; passengers will have to complete a few weeks of training beforehand. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon space capsule will be used for the private spaceflight missions that will be able to hold up to four people.
SpaceX hasn’t announced pricing yet, but previous Space Adventures flights have reportedly cost around $30-$35 million, so Virgin Galactic’s program is probably in more people’s budgets.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.