A health coach from Antigua and Barbuda has won two tickets worth nearly US$1 million to be among Virgin Galactic’s first space tourists — and plans to take the trip of a lifetime with her teenage daughter.
Keisha Schahaff, 44, said that she wanted to cross the final frontier with her 17-year-old, a science student living in Britain who dreams of one day working for NASA.
Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson surprised Schahaff with the news at her home in the Caribbean at the beginning of this month.
Photo: AFP
“I just thought I was doing a Zoom interview,” she said. “When I saw Richard Branson walking in, I just started screaming. I couldn’t believe it.”
“I always was interested in space as a little girl,” she added. “This is a great opportunity for me to feel alive and to just make the greatest adventure ever.”
Schahaff won the prize after entering a fundraiser sweepstakes organized by Virgin Galactic on the Omaze platform.
The US$1.7 million that was raised is to be donated to Space for Humanity, a non-government group that works for wider access to space.
The amount that she donated was not made public, but entry started with a minimum contribution of US$10.
Schahaff, a health and energy coach who works in particular with women, decided to take a shot at the prize after seeing an advertisement on a Virgin Atlantic flight.
“I just filled out the application, did what was required ... not realizing that I would have actually gotten a response to it,” she said.
The campaign attracted nearly 165,000 participants in eight weeks, Virgin Galactic said in a statement.
The announcement aimed to show that space tourism is opening up opportunities for a variety of people, despite prices remaining well beyond the reach of most.
“Being able to give people of all ages and backgrounds equal access to space, and in turn, the opportunity to lead and inspire others back on Earth, is what Virgin Galactic has been building towards for the past two decades,” Branson said.
The British septuagenarian flew in his company’s test mission to space in July, beating by a matter of days Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos in their billionaire space race.
Schahaff will be among the first of Virgin Galactic’s space tourists, but her place in the line has yet to be determined, a company spokesperson said.
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers on Monday said that the probability of the two spiral galaxies colliding is less than previously thought, with a 50-50 chance within the next 10 billion years. That is essentially a coin flip, but still better odds than previous estimates and farther out in time. “As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our galaxy seem greatly exaggerated,” the Finnish-led team wrote in a study appearing in Nature Astronomy. While good news for the Milky Way galaxy, the latest forecast might be moot
RSS