Less than 20 years ago a dream, and now a reality! Recently there has been an increased interest in space tourism and travelling to space. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson are part of this modern-day space race, to be the first to allow normal people like us to travel to space, or even live there.
This endeavour has been kickstarted with the recent manned launches into space by both Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, and Virgin Galactic, owned by Richard Branson. They aim to give tourists the ability to become astronauts and experience space travel for the first time.
The space race has been a fierce competition. Both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos had taken a very different approach to their launches. Jeff Bezos’s rocket, ‘The New Shepard’, had a booster and a capsule, which seated the 4 passengers. The take-off was vertical like a traditional rocket, and they used a parachute-like mechanism to land the passengers onto the desert floor, with the booster landing about 2 miles from the launchpad.
Richard Branson had an aeroplane like runway take off. The main spaceship with Richard Branson and the other 4 passengers was attached to two other small planes which are flown by pilots, after reaching a certain height the main spaceship separates from the other two planes and takes off like a traditional spaceship. After which it plunges down back to Earth for its descent at the launch site. In both of these launches, people were allowed to feel the weightlessness and the zero-G just for 2-3 minutes.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the owner of SpaceX has a different vision. He wishes to help humans colonize Mars and become a multi-planetary species. He, on the other hand, plans to launch to Mars by the end of this year with his rocket ‘Starship’.
This Space Race is just showing how we humans can do anything if we put our mind to it and are determined enough to do it. Space travel seemed like a joke just a few years ago, but now it has become a reality. This is why we should think the impossible, dream the impossible and do the impossible.
“Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.”
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