One giant step for everyone: German travel agency sells tickets to space

Variety
23-07-2021 | 13:33
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One giant step for everyone: German travel agency sells tickets to space
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One giant step for everyone: German travel agency sells tickets to space

If well-trodden tourism destinations seem too crowded or too banal, a Munich travel agency may have the ultimate solution.

Assuming of course you are physically fit, not recovering from an operation and have a spare 250,000 euros.

This is the price of a ticket, now open for bookings, to fly Virgin Galactic to space, for an hour.

Luxury travel agents 'Design Reisen' (Design Travel) is the only agency handling the bookings in Germany.

"Normally when you tell someone they should go to Ibiza it's the case that you maybe have been there and can say a little bit about the hotels. We can't really report anything about space or at least not about the course of the flight. And we were able to experience that, albeit only as a simulation but it was very real," says the Agency's manager Marion Aliabadi, who hoped she could now tell her clients a bit about their prospective trip.

Aliabadi stumbled across Richard Branson's project in 2009 at a Cannes travel fair and was hooked.

"Maybe it is the idea of being a pioneer - being one of the first tourists in space. Because it only has been astronauts so far. And not many. If you have a look at who has been in space, it wasn't that many. And to be able to say I did this, I experienced that. Or I broke another barrier. It's like a test, what else I can achieve. People are like this, they always want to go further, they want to expand their horizons. And it might be especially appealing to people who have already done many things," she says.

"It doesn't matter how old you are. You can be 90. If you are healthy and sporty...Being healthy, not just now recovering from a flu. Everybody can fly if that is covered. There is no limit. And to have the money of course! those 250,000 U.S. dollars so that you can afford that one hour flight. Those are the only two preconditions," Aliabadi adds from her Munich office.

The process from 2009 to now has seen Aliabadi undertaking 12 years of training to be able to understand what she is selling, including trips to the U.S. and the simulation trip in a centrifuge.

So far 8 tickets have been sold to male clients.

 
 
REUTERS
 
 

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