Virgin Galactic has officially announced that in less than a month it will be embarking on its, first private Astronaut Mission, seventh spaceflight and second commercial spaceflight dubbed ‘Galactic 02,’ on this flight will be a mother-daughter duo from Antigua.
Forty-six-year-old Keisha Schahaff and her 18-year-old daughter Anastasia Mayers will be the first such duo to fly to space and the first from the Caribbean on a whole.
The historic flight will take place on August 10.
Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson surprised Schahaff, a health and wellness coach, at her home in Antigua, with the news that she won two tickets to space in November 2021.
She had entered a sweepstake a month prior for the $450,000 opportunity after seeing an ad while travelling.
The entrepreneur had long dreamed of journeying to outer space and said in a release: “When I was two years old, just looking up to the skies, I thought, ‘How can I get there?’ But, being from the Caribbean, I didn’t see how something like this would be possible.”
The trip is also a dream come true for 18-year-old Mayers who is currently a second-year undergraduate studying philosophy and physics at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.
She aspires to become an astrobiologist for NASA and will be one step closer to that as she is about to become the second youngest person to travel to space.
The mother-daughter team will be travelling onboard VSS Unity along with American Jon Goodwin, who competed as a canoeist in the 1972 Munich Games, is 80 years old and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2014.
Goodwin is aiming to be the second person with the condition to travel to space.
Mother daughter duo from Antigua to fly to space in August | Loop Caribbean News. (n.d.). Loop News. Retrieved July 22, 2023, from https://caribbean.loopnews.com/content/mother-daughter-duo-antigua-fly-space-august
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