Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, as seen in 2014. (Image credit: Virgin Galactic)
For perhaps the first time, the humans inside a spacecraft will — in a strict financial sense — be worth more than the vehicle itself, as billionaires take to the skies this month in a pair of historic suborbital spaceflights that mark a dramatic change in what it takes to become an astronaut.
On July 11, British business magnate Richard Branson will strap himself into the cabin of the spaceplane VSS Unity, along with three employees of his space tourism company Virgin Galactic. Just over a week later, on July 20, in a move timed to coincide with the 52nd anniversary of Americans first landing on the moon, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will climb into a New Shepard capsule as a passenger on the first crewed flight conducted by his company, Blue Origin.
Neither flight will last long — each billionaire will slip out of gravity's clutches for a scant handful of minutes. But taken together, the two jaunts into suborbital space may usher in a new era of spaceflight and spaceflyers alike.
"I think the definition of 'astronaut' is up for grabs again right now," Jordan Bimm, a space historian at the University of Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, told Space.com. "What isn't changing is that space remains an incredibly elite space. It's just a different pathway there."
And however the idea of an astronaut changes moving forward, the role will retain flavors of the astronauts who have flown to date, affected by both the military aura of the Cold War astronaut and the scientific agenda of the space station researcher, he said. "It's not like it sheds those identities each time," Bimm said. "It builds on them, like an extra coat of paint on an old wall."
For both billionaires, the path to space began more than a decade ago, when each already-established entrepreneur founded a company aimed at spaceflight.
Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, and the company has always focused on suborbital passenger flights of a piloted space plane launched from a larger carrier plane. The first commercial flight was originally targeted to occur as early as 2008, but the company faced a host of delays, including a fatal accident in 2014.
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