LONDON: Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has made it clear that being on a ventilator hasn't curbed his lifestyle and said his next aim is to go join British tycoon Richard Branson on a space flight as early as next year. "Being on a ventilator has not curbed my lifestyle. Since going on a ventilator full time I have been to Brussels, the Isle of Man, Geneva, Canada, California twice, and I hope to go into space with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic," he said during a rare public appearance here.

It's been six long years since the Cambridge professor and author of the worldwide bestseller, 'A Brief History of Time', got a taste of weightlessness during a zero-G airplane flight from Nasa's Kennedy Space Center, but he still wants to feel the real deal aboard Virgin Galactic's 'SpaceShipTwo' rocket plane. After that flight Hawking declared, "Space, here I come!"

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Hawking eyes new milestone: Space flight