The first Ugandan in outer space

When the time came for him to propose to his longtime girlfriend, he chose to pop the question on the helipad of the Burj al Arab, Dubai’s 7-star luxury hotel, 321 metres above the ground, of Dubai.

The stunning view of the city, millions of lights stretching away in every direction far below them, left her so dizzy that she now insists it was her fear of heights that carried the day.

She consented to marry him just so he would take her back to ground level — or so she says.

That was in September, last year.

This year, Ashish Thakkar, who believes heights have always worked magic for him, is planning a far more daring escapade that is going to take him rather higher than the top of the Burj al Arab.

Instead of a constellation of man-made lights, this time around he will be surrounded by the countless trillions of stars in the universe.

The 28 year-old resident of Kampala is among the initial group of Virgin Galactic space tourists who have signed on for a trip to outer space that includes four to five minutes of weightlessness and will take 2.5 hours.

When Virgin Airlines tycoon Branson announced the Virgin Galactic venture in 2004, he said flights might begin in 2008.

Delays have pushed the date to 2010, more likely 2011.

Customers will be sent into space by rocket after being flown 50,000 feet into the air by a carrier craft called WhiteKnightTwo, which will take off from a runway, unlike the American space shuttles.

It has passed three tests, Wincer said.

The Virgin Galactic spacecraft built by Scaled Composites will be strapped to the underbelly of a specially designed jet carrier.

At 50,000 feet while still airborne, the spacecraft will be released to continue the journey on its own.

But the six-passenger, two-pilot SpaceShipTwo, that will carry the customers to space after WhiteKnightTwo releases it, must still be tested before flights can begin.

There have been three successful test flights of the mothership WhiteKnightTwo, which will launch the spacecraft SpaceShipTwo.

However, SpaceShipTwo will undergo a year’s worth of test flights before it is deemed safe for tourist flights.

Of course, the flight will not come cheap — the quick jaunt just beyond the earth’s atmosphere and into zero gravity weightlessness will cost the space tourists a cool $200,000 each.

But, “Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity. This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” says Thakkar, chief executive officer of the Mara Group.

His fellow spacefarers include actors, real estate magnates, CEOs and rich adventurers who can afford the fee.

Among them are actress and skin-care entrepreneur Victoria Principal, Hollywood film director Brian Singer and Soviet emige Lina Borozdina-Birch, who took a second mortgage of her house just to be on the trip.

Also booked are the husband and wife team of George and Loretta Whitesides, who want to spend their honeymoon on a space vehicle.

Thakkar and his group have undergone a series of tests and weightlessness exercises to prepare them for the conditions aboard the space vehicle during the flight.

In November last year, they completed a space flight training course at the National Aerospace Training and Research Centre (NASTAR) in Philadelphia.

“The training was an amazing experience,” said Thakkar. The flight simulation exercise were combined with sessions in the STS-400 centrifuge, which simulates the crushing G forces acting on the body during lift off: “I felt like I was really launching into space.”

Training at the Centre is an integral part of Virgin Galactic’s spaceflight programme, because during a flight, passengers will experience the same physiological stresses as professional astronauts, including elevated, sustained Gs.

Gs are a multiple of the normal effect of gravity on the human body.

For example, 3.5 Gs is three and a half times the normal weight a person feels while at rest on Earth, and is the force spacecraft passengers will feel on launch. They will experience 6 Gs on re-entry.

According to Thakkar, the wannabe astronaurts not only became accustomed to these stresses, for most people these effects, while intense, proved not only survivable but even enjoyable. Most of the participants laughed or whooped during their space launch simulation.

Each passenger will have a fully documented record of the whole trip and of course their astronaut wings.

So far, Virgin Galactic has recruited around 200 people to be part of its inaugural flight, which will blast off from the Mojave Desert Spaceport in California.

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.