Preeminent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking is planning a trip on Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic service.

Hawking making history again

Hawking is wheelchair bound, and suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a type of motor neuron disease. If Hawking makes it onto one of the early Virgin Galactic flights, he may also make history as being one of the first wheelchair-bound  people in space.

“This year I’m planning a zero-gravity flight and to go into space in 2009,” he told the the Daily Telegraph.

Hawking has previously argued that for humanity to survive it must abandon the Earth or risk oblivion through an asteroid collision or nuclear holocaust. So it is no surprise that Hawking is planning a trip on Virgin Galactic, which is already allowing space tourists to book $200,000 tickets for sub-orbital flights on a Spaceshipone-design space plane.

According to Virgin Galactic spokesperson, Stephen Attenborough, Hawking has the backing of Branson, who has said that if the company can ”possibly make it happen, then it should.”

The issue of payment has not yet been discussed, but given the success of Hawking’s best-selling book ”A Brief History of Time”, coming up with $200,000 should not be a problem.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 5:18 am under Science and technology, Technology.

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