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
CHAPTER 1 THE FIRST FLIERS In 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel to space The first human to go to space was Yuri Gagarin an air force pilot from the Soviet Union a nation based in Russia from 1922 to 1991 In 1961 Gagarin orbited or circled Earth in a spaceship called Vostok I During this era people were eager to explore space They wanted to learn more about the moon the sun and the rest of the solar system They wanted to launch satellites that could photograph and study Earth from space relay communications signals and assist military operations The Soviet Union and the United States raced to outdo each other in space technology 8
US astronaut Alan Bean was a pilot for the Apollo 12 mission to the moon He was the fourth person to walk on the moon The Soviet Union scored the first victory in the space race when it sent an unpiloted craft into orbit in 1957 The United States sent its own craft into orbit the next year Yuri Gagarin’s groundbreaking 1961 voyage showed that human space travel was possible After Gagarin’s trip many more astronauts traveled into space Some only orbited Earth as Gagarin did Others visited the moon Many astronauts flew to orbiting laboratories such as the Mir Space Station and the International Space Station ISS All these travelers worked for government space agencies Their missions were mostly scientific For instance astronauts visiting the moon brought back moon rocks for study by scientists on This moon rock was collected by Apollo 12 astronauts
