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The Journal Reporting on the community
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018
Jean Ries bought a ticket in 2008 for the first tourist space flight; he’s still waiting
Expecting to fly Jean Ries says he will never forget the first moment he flew a plane over 30 years ago.
“Once you’re in the air, you almost forget talking to the tower, it’s elating,” he says. The entrepreneur’s passion for flying has pushed him to some extremes in the intervening years. He attempted to get into the US Air Force and the Royal Air Force, he regularly pilots his own plane and, more recently, was accepted into the Virgin Galactic founders club. As one of 80 people hand-picked by Richard Branson’s team, Ries stumped up $200,000 for a
place on the first passenger space flight, which was expected to launch in 2010. It didn’t. “I think there may have been an underestimation of the time and strict requirements by authorities for this aircraft to be ready,” Ries suggests. A major factor was the tragic in-flight breakup of the VSS Enterprise on 31 October 2014, killing one pilot and injuring another. The experimental Virgin Galactic craft violently broke apart and crashed into the Mojave desert in California.
It was the first fatality on a spacecraft since the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster and something Ries doesn’t like to focus on. But it puts into perspective the groundbreaking work of firms like Virgin Galactic. Ries likens commercial space exploration to aviation in the 1930s when fatalities were commonplace. As technology improved with the advent of the pressurised cabin, flights became safer, more comfortable and cheaper. “In 1949, the Clipper flew from the US → to the UK, it cost $49,000, one-way.