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Keisha Schahaff took part in a lottery on an online platform that raised money for a non-governmental organization
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HANDOUT / AFP
A woman from the Caribbean state of Antigua and Barbuda won two tickets with a total value of 900,000 dollars for a flight into space.
The 44-year-old Keisha Schahaff wants to take her 17-year-old daughter into space, as the company Virgin Galactic of the British billionaire Richard Branson announced on Wednesday.
The teenager is currently studying astrophysics in Great Britain and dreams of a job at the US space agency Nasa.
Schahaff took part in a lottery on an online platform that raised money for a non-governmental organization that wants to give people access to space.
The minimum contribution was ten dollars.
Over a period of eight weeks, 165,000 people took part, raising $ 1.7 million.
How many Shahaff paid was not known.
Branson comes over
Branson personally informed the 44-year-old that she had won the two tickets, each worth $ 450,000 - and surprised her at home.
"I thought I was just going to have a Zoom conversation," Schahaff told the AFP news agency.
“When Richard Branson came in, I started screaming.
I could not believe it."
On July 11th, Branson flew into space on a test flight with a spaceplane from his company that attracted worldwide attention - nine days earlier than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Commercial operation is scheduled to start at the end of 2022.
Virgin Galactic says it has sold around 700 tickets.
The company competes with Bezos' private space provider Blue Origin.
ngo / afp