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15th Jul 2021

The Simpsons ‘predicted’ Richard Branson’s trip to space in 2014

Charlie Herbert

Yet again, The Simpsons seems to have predicted the future.

Along with everything that went on across the weekend, you may have missed the fact that Richard Branson went into space.

On Sunday July 11, the Virgin founder flew up to the edge of space on his Virgin Galactic flight in the plane’s first fully crewed test.

And whilst most of us were probably concerned with matters closer to home, particularly around the Wembley area, some people noticed that The Simpsons had actually depicted the billionaire in a similar situation a few years ago.

In the 25th season episode, first broadcast in 2014, Branson is briefly shown as a passenger in a spaceship, although he doesn’t actually speak in the episode, which was called ‘The Art of War.’

This maybe doesn’t rank up there with some of the other remarkable Simpsons predictions though, such as predicting that Donald Trump would be president in season 11 or the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle.

Branson expressed his desire to go into space back in 2004, a full decade before the Simpsons episode in question was aired. So we’ll give them a half mark for this one.

Back in the real world, Branson was delighted with how his inaugural space flight went.

After landing back on earth he said: “Seventeen years of hard work to get us this far.”

The flight lasted less than 15 minutes, but some are arguing he didn’t actually make it to space as the aircraft didn’t cross the Kármán line that is said to define the barrier of entry to space.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning his own space adventure on July 20, when he travels in his Blue Origin spacecraft with his brother.

First we had USA vs USSR in the space race of the Cold War. Now it’s Branson vs Bezos.