The first Ugandan in outer space

Thakkar’s dream of travelling to space were nurtured during early years filled with great adversity, but also great dedication and great effort, crowned with improbable and unexpected successes.

At the age of 14, Thakkar quit school to set up a small IT shop, which developed to the multimillion-shilling business empire known as the Mara Group with offices in Dubai and Kampala.

The group has an impressive 15-year history in information technology, real estate, financial services, hospitality, energy, packaging, retail and media, with an extensive network in Africa, Middle East, Europe and Asia.

“Our brand has become synonymous with innovation and entrepreneurial flair,” says Thakkar; well, it has certainly made him rich enough to realise his childhood dream.

Virgin Group’s flamboyant boss Sir Richard Branson is Thakkar’s hero. He points out that, like him, Sir Richard never finished high school.

As the craft accelerates to 4,800kph (four times the speed of sound), passengers are pinned to their seats.

Once the spacecraft’s speed stabilises, passengers can view the sky through the large windows, as it changes from blue to mauve, then indigo and finally to black.

They will finally find themselves floating as the vehicle escapes earth’s gravitational pull.

Below them, they will see an image of the earth already familiar from television and the Internet — but astronauts insist that there sis nothing like the real thing.

After four minutes of weightlessness, the pilot will ask the passenger to buckle up for the return trip to Earth.

Virgin Galactic is one of the world’s first space tourism companies, founded by Sir Richard Branson as a part of the worldwide Virgin Group.

It plans to construct the world’s first commercial spaceport, Spaceport America, (formerly Southwest Regional Spaceport) in Upham, New Mexico, an uninhabited, unincorporated town near the town of Las Cruces.

The flight vehicle for Virgin Galactic will be based on the successful SpaceShipOne design, which won the Ansari X-Prize for space tourism in 2004. SpaceShipTwo, or Virgin SpaceShip (VSS) as it will be called, is scheduled to start giving commercial flights in mid 2009.

The flights that Virgin Galactic will initially offer will be true spaceflights, in the sense that they will be at an altitude of about 108 km, just above the Kármán line that separates the earth from space.

However, they are still suborbital flights — that is, they scrape the edge of space without actually entering into a stable orbit and staying there.