INTRODUCTION A STAR STUDDED DEBUT Richard Branson introduces Virgin Galactic’s new spacecraft Unity The air was electric inside a big hangar aircraft shed at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Southern California Music pounded and a crowd of people flocked to a stage beneath dazzling blue lights Something exciting was about to happen The date was February 19 2016 and Virgin Galactic a pioneering space tourism company was about to unveil its newest spaceship Unity To loud applause a white Range Rover drove onto the stage with the sleek and shiny spacecraft in tow Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson a British businessman proudly introduced Unity to the crowd 4
Harrison Ford attends the unveiling of Unity inset A crowd gathers to get a closer look at Unity below The gathering was a star-studded event Actor Harrison Ford who played Han Solo in four Star Wars movies was there Malala Yousafzai who had earned worldwide honors for fighting for the rights of girls in her native Pakistan praised the new spaceship in a video shown at the event It’s such a great work she said And it’s a way that we are inspiring young people in this whole world to explore more to go farther and to have no boundaries 5
The most moving words came from British physicist Stephen Hawking He did not attend the event but spoke to the crowd through a recording We are entering a new space age Hawking said Taking more and more passengers out into space will enable them and us humankind to look both outwards and back but with a fresh perspective in both directions It will help bring new meaning to our place on Earth and to our responsibilities as its stewards and it will help us to recognize our place and our future in the cosmos which is where I believe our ultimate destiny lies speech to the Virgin Galactic event He is excited about the Stephen Hawking sent a recorded future of space travel for humanity Hawking is one of around seven hundred people with tickets to ride on Unity when it’s ready to fly The craft will take six passengers at a time for a short ride into space Several other firms are also gearing up to fly tourists into space Before the twenty-first century only trained astronauts could travel into space and only government agencies operated 6
spacecraft As of 2016 only about 550 people had visited the vast expanse beyond Earth But private businesses are jumping into the space travel industry They will open the experience of spaceflight to thousands of tourists from nations around the world Aboard Unity and other vehicles space tourists will experience several minutes of weightlessness the feeling of being free of the pull of Earth’s gravity They will also get spectacular views of Earth from space The rides won’t come cheap though A flight on Unity costs about 250,000 But many people think it’s a fair price to pay for the trip of a lifetime Very few people have seen Earth from space This image was created by combining several satellite images 7
