Branson: I’d be delighted to go to Bezos space launch if invited

Virgin founder Richard Branson on Wednesday said he would be “delighted” to go to fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos’s space launch if he were to be invited.

Appearing on CNN with Sirisha Bandla, the astronaut who joined him on his space flight this week, Branson was asked by CNN anchor Poppy Harlow if we would attend the launch of Bezos’s rocket, noting that fellow space enthusiast and billionaire Elon Musk attended his.

“If I’m invited, I’d be delighted to go,” Branson said. “It’s gonna be a wonderful thing to watch, but otherwise I’ll watch from my holiday.”

After rocketing into space, Richard Branson predicts “over the years to come, there will be thousands of people who we will put into space and will become astronauts, and hopefully will come back and realize what a special world we live in.” https://t.co/8wV0BFyDjg pic.twitter.com/RSPwgqrXbw

— CNN (@CNN) July 14, 2021

Harlow asked Branson to respond to some criticisms that the billionaire space race has faced, stating that this sort of spending does not help address more pressing issues going on in the world.

“I think that you need people like myself, too. … If you talk about airplane travel a hundred years ago, you had entrepreneurs that, you know, built airplanes that now have transformed the world and enabled most people to be able to afford to be able to fly,” Branson responded.

“We’re building the beginning of a new space line which hopefully will enable, in a hundred years’ time, many people to be able to go to space, maybe to go to one part of the world to another part of the world in a fraction of the time.”

Branson also stressed that the pursuit of space travel has also enabled the development of other innovative technologies such as the satellites that his company has developed.