The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: December 12, 2010

Official News page 9


REAL LIFE NEWS: GET SET FOR YOUR TRIP INTO SPACE

by Hazed

In Fed DataSpace, leaving Earth is a simple matter: you bribe the galactic administration clerk to get your ship permit, you sign your soul over to the bank to buy a ship from Jarrow shipyard, and you board a shuttle to get into orbit and join your ship.

In real life, it's not so easy, and until now only astronauts employed by national governments - and the occasional billionaire - could ever leave Earth's gravity field and venture into space.

But that's about to change, as Virgin Galactic's new commercial spaceship could be ready to fly its first passengers in about a year, according to Richard Branson, the company founder.

The ship is called SpaceShipTwo and it will provide six passengers and two pilots with a brief taste of weightlessness, and a view of the Earth from space. It won't be cheap, though - seats are likely to cost $200,000 a ride.

On the one hand, I find this tremendously exciting. A brief visit to space on its own would be amazing, and it will surely develop in the future into the capability to go properly into space, and even visit the moon.

On the other hand... this week I had to travel out of town for a conference, taking a Virgin train from London to Birmingham. It wasn't a happy experience. The return journey, which should have taken one hour and twenty minutes, was punctuated with mysterious slowdowns, stops in the middle of nowhere, a diversion to another track to avoid a broken down train, and eventually lasted almost three hours. I do hope Virgin Galactic's standards are a little higher than that!

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