Richard Branson claims he wants to travel to space within the next four or five months aboard his Virgin Galactic spaceship.
The British entrepreneur says that he hopes to make his first voyage
coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969.
He also claims that the spaceflight company are still on target to send
tourists into on short ‘suborbital’ flights by the end of next year.
Speaking at an event in Washington, he said: ‘My wish is to go up on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, that’s what we’re working on.’.
The American Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on July 20th, 1969.
Earlier this year, the 69-year-old said he is training hard for the mission, and told CBS that his ‘aim is to have the body of a 30-year-old’ when he goes to space.
Virgin Galactic is working along with Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s SpaceX company towards the same goal of being the first to send passengers into space ‘by 2020’ in a new type of race dubbed the ‘billionaire space race’.
The companies want to send people on these short suborbital flights, meaning they wouldn’t get high enough to orbit the earth.
Branson has previously announced dates for this first trip into space, though many have gone by without voyages happening.
In 2013, he declared on a radio station that a Virgin Galactic space flight will be on Christmas Day 2013, and he will be on board. ‘Maybe I’ll dress up as Father Christmas,’ he joked.
Christmas day 2013 came and went without this flight or a sighting of the billionaire in a Santa suit taking place.
In October 2017, he told a Finnish business conference that the craft would be in space in ‘about three months’.
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