Stephen Hawking is going to go to space.

The cosmologist and physicist will leave the Earth on board Richard Branson’s spaceship, he has said.

Professor Hawking told Good Morning Britain that he’d never dreamed he’d be able to head into space. But “Richard Branson has offered me a seat on Virgin Galactic, and I said yes immediately”, he said.

Richard Branson’s spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, hopes soon to carry people into space on commercial missions. Mr Branson had suggested that he might be able to complete a flight in 2009, but the plan has been thrown off by a range of problems and disasters.

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