Pakistani News

Virgin Galactic is planning to launch flights to space from the UAE, the company's president has revealed.

The company hopes to start flights into space from a spaceport it plans to build in the UAE within two years of the service taking off from its worldwide operating base in New Mexico, Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic said.

In 2005, Virgin Galactic had reached an agreement with authorities in New Mexico to build a $200 million spaceport in the south of the state. A second spaceport is planned in Sweden to give the operation a European base.

The Virgin Galactic mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, is under development with scale models expected to take the sky in late July. The jet-powered aircraft is designed to fly the crew and passengers to 50,000 feet before releasing the SpaceShipTwo orbiter.

An artist’s impression of passengers experiencing zero gravity from the cabin of SpaceShipTwo.

Virgin employees sit in the cabin of a prototype Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo. The ship will carry six passengers and two pilots, offering a total flight time of 2 hours.

Virgin Galactic will be the world’s first commercial space travel operator and tickets for the flights currently start from $200,000 each.
It has not set a deadline for the launch of the space flights, but plans to start commercial flights around a year after the unveiling of prototypes and test flights has been completed.


Virgin founder Richard Branson (pictured) will be the first passenger to be flown to space in the first commercial flight, along with the designer of the Virgin Galactic spacecraft SpaceShipTwo, Burt Rutan who is designing the spaceship.