Wally Funk, our intrepid soon-to-be space traveler, joined the crowd of 600 space fans who gathered in Las Cruces, New Mexico, last week for the dedication of the SpacePort American Runway (that's a picture of her with the founder of the project, Sir Richard Branson; New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson; and former astronaut Buzz Aldrin.)
Branson, millionaire entrepeneur and founder of Virgin Galactic, a commercial space-flight company, expects to begin taking passengers into space as early as next spring. Ticket price? $200,000. Length of trip? About an hour, give or take.
Here's how TIme magazine describes it:
The Virgin Galactic experience will start with a couple of days light preparation: medical tests, safety training and some time for the space travelers and pilots to get to know each other. The aircraft will set off attached to a mother ship, which will climb to 50,000 feet before detaching. Then the Enterprise's rocket motors will ignite, accelerating the ship to three times the speed of sound, taking it up over the Earth's atmosphere. At that point, the engines will shut off, leaving passengers weightless, able to somersault freely, and, most importantly, see Earth from space. "That's the point when the switch flicks," says Attenborough. "You get an understanding of the fragility of life and the beauty of the planet." After four or five minutes gravity will begin to drag the Enterprise back down to earth. The whole trip is over in less than an hour." (Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2027613,00.html#ixzz13yzlLXCk)
For Wally, it will be the hour she's been waiting for since she was an aviation student at Stephens College.
And we'll be rooting for her, every magic moment.
