Ketty Maisonrouge has waited 15 years for a space trip

Ketty Maisonrouge – The 61-year-old business school professor signed up back in 2005 for the promise of five minutes in zero-gravity, paying $250,000 (£190,500) to travel beyond the the earth’s atmosphere.

Now the company that sold her the ticket, Virgin Galactic, says it will finally begin flights this year. Its founder, Sir Richard Branson, will be on the first trip, and Mrs Maisonrouge won’t be far behind.

“Hopefully it will be as amazing as I think,” says Mrs Maisonrouge.

If all goes to plan, Virgin Galactic will be the first private company to take tourists into space. The company says 600 people have already purchased tickets, including celebrities like Justin Bieber and Leonardo DiCaprio.

But rival firms are close behind. Blue Origin, started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has also signed up passengers for trips it hopes to start this year, while SpaceX, founded by Tesla’s Elon Musk, announced in 2019 that a Japanese billionaire would be its first passenger for a trip around the moon.

In 2019, Swiss bank UBS released a report estimating space tourism could become a $3bn industry in the next 10 years.

For Virgin Galactic, early buyers such as Mrs Maisonrouge helped prove the demand was there for private space travel – even with ticket prices at a quarter of a million dollars.

“To be able to put products as expensive as space on the market in the first place does include a high premium,” explains Julia Hunter, a senior vice-president at Virgin Galactic responsible for the day-to-day running of the human spaceflight programme.

Mrs Maisonrouge’s love of space started early. She can still remember vividly the moment in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon.

When she learned that Virgin Galactic was offering to send ordinary travellers to space, she immediately rushed to sign up.

Since buying her ticket, Mrs Maisonrouge has kept her plans mostly private, sharing them only with family, close friends and her fellow “founders” – the group of original Virgin Galactic ticket holders.

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In November 2019, a group of them got their first chance to try on the spacesuits – designed by sportswear brand Under Armour – which they will wear on their trip to space.

“For me, it was like the realisation that this is really going to happen soon,” says Mrs Maisonrouge. “When you’ve been waiting for 15 years, when you’ve been dreaming about it for as long as you can remember, you wonder until it happens if it will really happen.”

Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/