Virgin Galactic's private SpaceShipTwo spacecraft flies over the San Francisco Bay in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Wednesday, April 6, 2011.
If your idea of dream job includes blasting to the edge of space, floating weightlessly for a few minutes and gliding back home, then this job offer is for you. (via Techland)
Virgin Galactic, the brainchild of energetic entrepreneur Richard Branson and engineer extraordinaire Burt Rutan, is hiring the first batch of three astronauts to fly its customers to the edge of space. The company plans to offer its first commercial flight in circa two years, for the relatively cheap price of $200.000. Virgin Galactic says that already 410 people signed up for the adventure of a lifetime.
Future spacemen will have to fly both the mother-ship WhiteKnightTwo and the actual spacecraft called, in a flight of fancy, SpaceShipTwo. Being the first group of operatives, they will have to participate in a range of cool activities such as test flight and development of the whole spaceflight system, and plant the seed for the esprit de corp of the future batch of astronauts.
Requirements, unsurprisingly, are rather strict: future spaceman will have to be test pilots, with at least 3000 hours on their logbooks and have experience on high performance jets. If you’ve seen the heart-stopping video of the first flight of SpaceShipOne (the prototype of the SpaceShipTwo) you’d know why. Oh, and — who’d have thought — “prior spaceflight experience is an advantage.
See more about the job posting at Techland.