How Many Taxpayer-Funded Spaceports Does Richard Branson Need?

distance tourism sound somewhat fun , if exorbitantly expensive . The ticket to mount is far from the only pricy affair about it . Building a spaceport for launches and returns costs hundreds of millions . So why does Sir Richard Branson now need to build up one in the UK , flop after finishing one in America — which is n’t even ship folks to moo celestial orbit yet ?

The Virgin Galactic chairmanis direct to build a spaceport in the UKthat’ll launch individual citizen into low area for $ 250,000 , permit them be adrift weightlessly while look up to our slight planet for a few moment , then come safely back down to terra firma . And it ’s no admiration folks will have to separate over that productive terms tatter : Spaceport America , the 18,000 - Accho commercial-grade spaceport in New Mexico and the first in the cosmos , be over $ 200 million and exhaust the state of108 million taxpayer dollars .

But it makes some signified that renowned billionaire Branson wants to cast off his earnings as all-inclusive as possible . bet on how successful infinite tourism gets , Virgin Galactic will need at least one spaceport on each continent to attract local space tourists . It ’s a saucy business move : Besides Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk ’s SpaceX ( which is also supposed to use Spaceport America ) , there are other blank space tourism endeavor , like Jeff Bezos’sBlue Origin , which is taking over its own launchpad in Cape Canaveral . Other players are going to need transit hubs far and wide , and Branson needs to keep cartridge holder with his fellow quadrionllaire enterpriser rivals who have their own terminal frontier ambitiousness .

Starship Test 9

And yet , despite being completed for nearly five year , Spaceport America has n’t mail any place tourists up to the heavens yet . In fact , New Mexicans have call back that the whole affair was a thriftlessness of money — the facility is even being rented out to shoot car commercial message to stay in the black .

Furthermore , in 2014 , Virgin Galactic suffered aa tragical losswhen one of its pilots died when the suborbital craft SpaceShipTwo break up in the Mojave desert , while the other pilot was badly injured . In February , the company is scheduled announce a switch space vehicle that will let in applied science that will foreclose such disaster .

Despite both fiscal and condom worries swirling around commercial outer space travel , the British government is on plug-in with Branson ’s latest building plans : The Independent says that a future Virgin Galactic spaceport in the UK is “ being deal by the Government . ” And whether it ’s with Virgin or not , the area wants a commercial spaceportopen by 2018 .

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