One of Scotland’s richest men, Tayside’s Tony Banks, will be among the first civilians to go into space when Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic blasts off. In an exclusive interview, he tells Jack McKeown why it was $200,000 well spent.
“They’re doing test flights at the moment and from what I hear everything’s going pretty well. They haven’t yet said when the first flights will be but I turn 50 in October and I’m hoping my flight will be at some point in my 50th year.”
Brought up in Dundee, Tony now lives in Kirriemuir. In 1991 the Falklands veteran bought an old Victorian house in Kirriemuir and converted it into a care home for the elderly. He’s since built the Balhousie Group into once of Scotland’s biggest providers of residential and nursing care facilities, with 20 care homes and beds for 750 residents.
In 2009 he featured in an episode of the Channel 4 show Secret Millionaire, where wealthy people live in secret among the poor before deciding who is most deserving of financial help.
He gave away £130,000 of his estimated £50 million fortune, but was also forced to flee the Liverpool estate where he had set up home after thugs threw bricks at his building and set fire to nearby cars and houses.
A keen philanthropist, he is a high-profile supporter of the charity Combat Stress.
Tony is old enough to have witnessed the most significant moment in space exploration to date.
“The whole flight will be about two hours long and we’ll be weightless for about five or 10 minutes,” Tony said. “You don’t quite fully escape the atmosphere but you go high enough to see the curvature of the Earth and its blueness, and then you’re into the blackness of space.
“Four hundred people have signed up for it so far and I think I’m astronaut number 200. I’m at an awards ceremony with Richard in a couple of months’ time so I’ll maybe have a word in his ear and see if he can’t bump me up the list a bit.”
Most of those who’ve signed up for flights have only paid the minimum $20,000 deposits but Tony is so keen he’s paid the full $200,000 up front.
“For that, I’ve got a die-cast model of the spaceship so I already feel like I’ve got my money’s worth,” he joked.
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