British billionaire Sir Richard Branson is preparing to blast into space on Sunday in a watershed moment for his company, Virgin Galactic, and the fledgling space tourism industry.
If all goes to plan, Sir Richard, 70, will beat rival space entrepreneur and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos into space by a matter of days.
Sir Richard announced he would be part of a team of six on board Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity rocket ship for its next suborbital flight, due to take off on Sunday or soon after. Mr Bezos had earlier revealed he would be flying to space on July 20 on a rocket built by Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000 and recently stepped away from Amazon to focus on.
But Sir Richard, who founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 with a dream of making space tourism a reality, has played down suggestions he was racing the Amazon founder to space.
“I know nobody will believe me when I say it, but honestly, there isn't [competition],” he told US broadcaster NBC on Tuesday.
The Virgin Galactic founder insisted there was room for several companies to fill the same space tourism niche as his company, which is built around providing short, suborbital flights using a rocket-powered plane launched by a larger carrier aircraft.
Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft is designed to fly to an altitude of 90 kilometres, giving those on board a chance to experience weightlessness before gliding back down to Earth.
Blue Origin also plans to offer suborbital flights, using a more conventional rocket that takes off and lands vertically.
More than 600 people have reportedly reserved seats on Virgin Galactic trips to space, with tickets initially costing $250,000. The price is expected to increase when Virgin Galactic starts accepting reservations again.
Given the dangerous nature of space flight, Sir Richard, who has a wife and two children and a net worth of around $5.6 billion, has also sought to shrug off the risks associated with the trip.
In 2014, a prototype of the Virgin Galactic rocket crashed into the Mojave Desert during a test flight, killing one pilot and seriously injuring the other.
Sir Richard said his children were, like him, excited. His wife, on the other hand, was not.
“She’s the last person who would want to do something like this,” he said.
Virgin Galactic plans to live-stream the flight on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
As he unveiled the rocket that will accelerate him and the rest of the crew to more than 5,000 kph over New Mexico, Sir Richard said: “I always envisioned as a kid that a spaceship should look like this.”
“It’s going to be quite a ride,” he said.
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
The Little Things
Directed by: John Lee Hancock
Starring: Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto
Four stars
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
FIGHT CARD
Sara El Bakkali v Anisha Kadka (Lightweight, female)
Mohammed Adil Al Debi v Moaz Abdelgawad (Bantamweight)
Amir Boureslan v Mahmoud Zanouny (Welterweight)
Abrorbek Madaminbekov v Mohammed Al Katheeri (Featherweight)
Ibrahem Bilal v Emad Arafa (Super featherweight)
Ahmed Abdolaziz v Imad Essassi (Middleweight)
Milena Martinou v Ilham Bourakkadi (Bantamweight, female)
Noureddine El Agouti v Mohamed Mardi (Welterweight)
Nabil Ouach v Ymad Atrous (Middleweight)
Nouredin Samir v Zainalabid Dadachev (Lightweight)
Marlon Ribeiro v Mehdi Oubahammou (Welterweight)
Brad Stanton v Mohamed El Boukhari (Super welterweight
'Dark Waters'
Directed by: Todd Haynes
Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, William Jackson Harper
Rating: ****
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Send “thenational” to the following numbers or call the hotline on: 0502955999
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2.0
Director: S Shankar
Producer: Lyca Productions; presented by Dharma Films
Cast: Rajnikanth, Akshay Kumar, Amy Jackson, Sudhanshu Pandey
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
AndhaDhun
Director: Sriram Raghavan
Producer: Matchbox Pictures, Viacom18
Cast: Ayushmann Khurrana, Tabu, Radhika Apte, Anil Dhawan
Rating: 3.5/5
Scores
Scotland 54-17 Fiji
England 15-16 New Zealand
The biog
Age: 32
Qualifications: Diploma in engineering from TSI Technical Institute, bachelor’s degree in accounting from Dubai’s Al Ghurair University, master’s degree in human resources from Abu Dhabi University, currently third years PHD in strategy of human resources.
Favourite mountain range: The Himalayas
Favourite experience: Two months trekking in Alaska
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Five ways to get fit like Craig David (we tried for seven but ran out of time)
Start the week as you mean to go on. So get your training on strong on a Monday.
Train hard, but don’t take it all so seriously that it gets to the point where you’re not having fun and enjoying your friends and your family and going out for nice meals and doing that stuff.
Think about what you’re training or eating a certain way for — don’t, for example, get a six-pack to impress somebody else or lose weight to conform to society’s norms. It’s all nonsense.
Get your priorities right.
And last but not least, you should always, always chill on Sundays.
Global state-owned investor ranking by size
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'The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey'
Rating: 3/5
Directors: Ramin Bahrani, Debbie Allen, Hanelle Culpepper, Guillermo Navarro
Writers: Walter Mosley
Stars: Samuel L Jackson, Dominique Fishback, Walton Goggins
UPI facts
More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
From exhibitions to the battlefield
In 2016, the Shaded Dome was awarded with the 'De Vernufteling' people's choice award, an annual prize by the Dutch Association of Consulting Engineers and the Royal Netherlands Society of Engineers for the most innovative project by a Dutch engineering firm.
It was assigned by the Dutch Ministry of Defence to modify the Shaded Dome to make it suitable for ballistic protection. Royal HaskoningDHV, one of the companies which designed the dome, is an independent international engineering and project management consultancy, leading the way in sustainable development and innovation.
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