Glenys is Over the Moon About Space Trip

27th April 2009, 12:30 WST

The first Australian woman bound for space might have had a sense of her own destiny 40 years ago when she wagged school to watch Neil Armstrong’s moon landing.
 
Glenys Ambe, who has bought a ticket on Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceship, resembled a giddy schoolgirl today as she sat and watched a simulated flight of the aircraft.
 
The 56-year-old fashion shop owner from Brisbane was a star guest at a technology launch by Virgin Galactic in Sydney, which included a digital simulation of the two-hour flight that will cost her $277,400.
 
The two pilots and six passengers on board will spend just four minutes in space - that’s a cool $69,350 a minute to experience the thrill of zero gravity.
 
But Ms Ambe has no doubts it will be money well spent.
 
“I have always wanted to go up into space,” she said.
 
“I’m old enough to remember the first manned flights (to the moon).
 
“The only day I wagged school in my whole life was when my father gave me permission to ... the day they walked on the moon.”
 
Testing of the six-passenger craft, SpaceShipTwo, and its mother ship, WhiteKnightTwo, is expected to take until mid 2011.
 
Commercial flights will follow later that year under a lottery system for the first 500 passengers, who include Branson, his family and other VIPs.
 
Ms Ambe is one of 15 Australians, and 300 people worldwide, who have bought tickets and will fly after the VIPs.
 
She will be the first Australian woman on a space flight, realising her dream sometime in 2012 or thereafter.
 
It seems a long way off, but she doesn’t mind the wait.
 
“That’s okay, space will still be there. I’m not a three-year-old who needs it now,” Ms Ambe said.
 
Virgin Galactic launched in 2004 and completed three space flights in smaller, pilot-only versions of the craft.
 
WhiteKnightTwo is in test phase, with a dual fuselage jet-engine design built to carry SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of 15km.
 
The rocket-propelled spaceship will then detach and burn fuel for 90 seconds to reach an altitude of 110km.
 
It will remain suspended in zero gravity for four minutes before gliding back to its point of origin at an airstrip in the New Mexico desert.
 
US Travel company Virtuoso heads ticket sales for Virgin Galactic and expects prices to emulate the history of passenger jet travel.
 
“It starts at a very high ticket price and then the natural evolution of this is to make it more ubiquitous, to make it more egalitarian,” Virtuoso chief executive Matthew Upchurch said.
 
“So I do feel that the price point will drop dramatically.”
 
Virtuoso’s head of “astronaut sales”, Carolyn Wincer, said the global economic downturn had slowed sales in the first quarter of 2009.
 
But she expects 500 tickets to be sold before the first passenger flight and 50,000 in the first 10 years of operation.
 
Galactic trips are expected to be as frequent as once a week. The quick jaunt into space is just the tip of the iceberg.
 
“This is just the beginning for us,” Ms Wincer said.
 
“We want to do orbital flights. We want to be able to do lunar flights.”
 
SYDNEY
AAP

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Video interview with Glenys on her trip to space >