Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2015

and on the basis of the experience of its staff of more than 400 engineers and technicians. Regardless, or perhaps unaware, of the po- tential dangers, the number of prospec- tive space tourists who over the years have booked a flight on SpaceShipTwo has con- tinued to grow to just under 700, with about 80 million dollars al- ready cashed in. Among the aspiring “astronauts” there are many famous names, such as movie and mu- sic stars the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Justin Bieber and Russell Brand, or well-known scientists such as Stephen Haw- king and Alan Stern, all willing to pay the handsome sum of $250,000 for a flight of about 3 hours, with 6 minutes of weight- lessness and back to the starting point. There are even those who went as far as to offer $876,000 for a ticket auctioned off by Di- Caprio, entitling to a flight into “space” next to the star of Titanic. But also more “ordi- nary” people will have a chance of orbiting the Earth, and for free what’s more. In fact all they have to do is to win the reality show “Space Race” created by the radio-television NBC network in team with Virgin Galactic. In short, a great enthu- siasm around the ini- tiative –enthusiasm that was however sig- nificantly dampened D ouble page, the dramatic sequence of the disintegration of SpaceShipTwo. In the first two im- ages everything goes as expected, but suddenly, as shown in the suc- cessive images, the spaceplane loses its wings, spins on itself and turns into a cloud of debris. At this stage, one of the two pilots, Peter Siebold (pictured left), in- credibly manages to bail out of the aircraft and para- chute to safety. In contrast, the