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Chinese businessmen plan space trip
Two Chinese business people will be among
the first 100 people to make a three-and-a-half hour space
trip at the end of 2008 with the New Mexico-based space tourism
company Virgin Galactic, reports Thursday's Beijing Morning
Post.
The trip will cost around 200,000 U.S. dollars and include
half an hour in space and five minutes experiencing zero gravity.
The company intends to send 520 people into space in about
100 launches during its first year.
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Virgin agent for China
only revealed that the two Chinese tourists were one
male and one female.
"Our goal is to end the exclusivity attached to
manned space travel, which means designing a privately-built
vehicle which can fly almost anyone to space safely
without the need for special expertise or exhaustive,
time consuming training," read a statement from
Virgin Galactic.
The Virgin trips require only three days of pre-flight
preparation. Previous space tourism in government-built
shuttles cost over 20 million U.S. dollars after half
a year of training.
Virgin Galactic will launch its test flight in late
2007, and will launch commercial operations a "little
over a year later". |
Up to now, four people have paid 20 million U.S. dollars each
to become space tourists, including an Iranian-born American
woman Anousheh Ansari, who returned from an 11-day trip to
the International Space Station in late September.
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