ARE YOU READY FOR SPACE TRAVEL?

Richard Branson is a famous businessman. He owns an airline, trains and now a company that will arrange flights to travel in space. In one of his speeches about the subject, he said, ’Space travel will be like every other business. There will be competitors. Thirty months from now, I’m confident we’ll be flying people into space’.

Branson’s company Virgin Galactic aims to fly six passengers at the same time. They will fly the first spaceship in 2018. It will cost passengers $250,000 per person to be the first tourists in space. Branson himself plans to be one of the first people to travel into space on his commercial flights

So what will the journey be like? A plane called ‘White Knight two’ will carry the spaceship as far as it can within the Earth’s atmosphere. The journey will start from a point close to the highest mountain range in the northern hemisphere. The plane will carry the spaceship to an altitude of 15,000 metres up in the sky and then it will drop it; then the spaceship’s rocket engine will start up, blasting the vehicle beyond the Earth’s atmosphere into outer space.

The passengers will be able to see all the beauty of the earth from above - the oceans, of course, the clouds,
and the land. Especially, the Himalayas will be the easiest point to see as it is the highest mountain range on earth.

I am going to start saving money today. I won’t have enough money to travel in space next year but I am sure as it gets popular the cost of space travel will drop. In the future, I hope we will have the advantage of visiting other planets, and I hope one day we’ll get the chance to meet other life forms.