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Showing posts from July, 2021

A New Era of Spaceflight: Richard Branson vs Jeff Bezos

  On July 11th 2021, Sir Richard Branson and his guests launched off to the border of space and returned back, signalling the dawn of a new era of space tourism. Today, on June 20th, Jeff Bezos will travel on a Blue Origins spacecraft to space and back too. Now, you may be asking why these events are important, after all, it’s just some billionaires visiting space. But this is important because this is the first test flight just as tickets are now being sold and since the passengers of both flights are so high profile, it raises a lot of public awareness and hype for more affordable space travel. So, what is the difference between these two monumental flights? Firstly, there’s the altitude that they’ll be travelling to. Jeff Bezos will travel to the Karman line, which is 62 miles above sea level while Richard Branson will go to the US-recognised boundary of space, which is 55 miles, however, the extra 7 miles makes no difference. Next, they have very different spacecraft and launches,