👉 Background: Virgin Galactic is Richard Branson’s space tourism company, which plans to start commercial space flights early next year. But to get things moving, he's enlisted the folks at Boeing — the world’s largest aerospace company.

👉  What happened: Virgin Galactic inked a deal with Boeing to build two motherships, which'll take the spacecraft to its launch point before blastoff.

👉 What else: It's a key part of Virgin Galactic's plan to scale its space tourism biz to 400 flights per year. And, at a lazy $450k a ticket, you can see how space is becoming a major commercialisation opportunity.

What's the key learning?

💡 Over the last few years, we've seen SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic invest into a new space race: the tourism space race.

💡Space tourism is when people travel to space for recreational, leisure or business purposes, and this industry is expected to be worth $4.5 billion buckaroos by 2030! But while the big guns are rushing to get people there... It's kinda hard to see how it'll get off the ground, considering how expensive the flights are.

💡In April this year, SpaceX sent three businessmen to visit the International Space Station for US$55 million each. The hope is that as technology and cost barriers continue to fall, the price of tickets comes back down to earth... And we can all have a go!

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