Virgin space tourists will blast off to Bowie
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Posted in Bootnotes, 11th October 2004 09:33 GMT
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The first customers of Brit entrepreneur Richard Branson's space tourism programme - dubbed Virgin Galactic - will enjoy several minutes of weightlessness to the sound of David Bowie's Space Oddity.
The 1969 classic topped a poll of Virgin Radio listeners who were asked to vote on a suitable playlist for the £100,000 jaunts. Bowie pipped REM's Man on the Moon and Walking on the Moon by The Police to claim poll position in the VSS Enterprise's CD multichanger.
Branson hopes to have Virgin Galactica fully up-and-running by 2007. He has ordered four vehicles based on Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne, which recently claimed the $10m Ansari X-Prize for the first private spacecraft to complete two trips to above 100km within a fortnight. ®
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