If sending yourself into space is the ultimate publicity stunt, what next for Richard Branson? | Catherine Bennett
Thinking, maybe, that it brings some purifying wonder to the pointless exercise, space plutocrats like to emphasise that their wish as grown men to ride in a space rocket dates from more innocent times. Ever since I was five years old I've dreamed of travelling to space," Jeff Bezos says. Specifically to ride upwards for roughly as far as Huntingdon is from London, float for a few minutes, then come back again? It only increases your respect for the tots who settle for Disneyland.
Beating Amazon's founder to it last week, Richard Branson also aimed to bring to his somewhat shorter (turn back at Newport Pagnell) Virgin stunt, a flavour of Le Petit Prince. I was once a child with a dream, looking up at the stars," the author of Screw It, Let's Do It offered as the origin myth behind a video of him bobbing about in his space suit. It may be an incongruous thought for anyone who has come, after a lifetime's exposure, to understand Branson's dream as primarily that of making money and hoisting nearby women into the air. But fair enough, he was probably innocent once, even if it doesn't, like any early interest in the stars, come across in his autobiography, Losing My Virginity.
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