Stories of the prime minister and the president took up all our space yesterday. Today, their wives, on the other hand, are characters in a story about space.
In response to an inquiry from mbl.is, the president’s secretary corrected reports by the Daily Mail, which had stated that PM Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson’s wife, Anna Sigurlaug Pálsdóttir, had called Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, to sign up for a space flight with Virgin Galactic.
Örnólfur Thorsson, the president’s secretary explained that Richard Branson is a good friend of First Lady Dorrit Moussaieff’s, whom she has known for a long time. Örnólfur stated, “On the day of the terrible accident a few years ago [in October of 2014, when co-pilot Michael Alsbury, 39, died as the rocket plane VSS Enterprise came apart just after leaving the mothership that takes it to high altitude] she [Dorrit] sent him a note of condolences and then spoke with him on the phone. She said she would love to take a trip into space, although she wasn’t booking such a trip.”
Örnólfur added that Dorrit believed science in general, and health sciences in particular, had in many ways beneftted from the technological advances which had taken place through the development of space flights.
