Richard Branson completed a short space flight on Sunday aboard his own rocket ship. Take-off took place at 16:30 CET after being delayed by an hour and a half due to weather conditions on site and was broadcast live on the Virgin Galactic website. The British billionaire and five crewmates from his Virgin Galactic space tourism company reached an altitude of about 88 kilometers over the New Mexico desert — enough to experience three to four minutes of weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth — and then safely glided home to a runway landing. "Seventeen years of hard work to get us this far," a jubilant Branson said as he congratulated his team on the trip back aboard the sleek white space plane, named Unity. Ahead of the space flight, he had said in a Twitter post that his "mission statement is to turn the dream of space travel into a reality — for my grandchildren, for your grandchildren, for everyone." The London-born founder of the Virgin Group, who turns 71 in a week, wasn't supposed to fly until later this summer. But he assigned himself to an earlier flight after Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos announced plans to ride his own rocket into space from West Texas on July 20. Virgin Galactic doesn't expect to start flying customers before next year. Blue Origin has yet to open ticket sales or even announce prices, but late last week boasted via Twitter that it would take clients higher and offer bigger windows. Unlike Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX, which launch capsules atop reusable booster rockets, Virgin Galactic uses a twin-fuselage aircraft to get its rocket ship aloft. The space plane is released from the mothership about 13,400 meters up, then fires its rocket motor to streak straight to space. The rocket plane's portion of the flight took just 15 minutes. Branson — along with Virgin Galactic employees Beth Moses, Colin Bennett, and Sirisha Bandla and pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci — boarded the SpaceShipTwo, a winged plane with a single rocket motor that the company has spent nearly two decades developing, before the crack of dawn. Attached beneath its massive, twin-fuselaged mothership, dubbed WhiteKnightTwo, the vehicle took to the skies at 8:30 am MT and climbed to about 50,000 feet in the air. Just after 9:15 in the morning, the SpaceShipTwo detached from its mothership and dropped momentarily before its engine screamed to life and the vehicle swooped upward. On board, the passengers experienced up to three Gs of force from the burst of extreme acceleration and watched the blue sky fade into the star-speckled darkness of outer space. At the top of the flight path, more than 50 miles high, the vehicle was suspended in weightlessness for a few minutes, allowing the passengers to enjoy panoramic views of the Earth and space as SpaceShipTwo flipped onto its belly. It then deployed its feathering system, which curls the plane's wings upward, mimicking the shape of a badminton shuttlecock, to turn the spaceship rightward as it flew back into the Earth's thick atmosphere and glided back down to a runway landing. As Branson floated around in microgravity, he taped a message using cameras onboard the space plane: "To all you kids out there — I was once a child with a dream, looking up to the stars. Now I'm an adult in a spaceship...If we can do this, just imagine what you can do," he said. Branson's flight is a landmark moment for the commercial space industry. The up-and-coming sector has for years been seeking to make suborbital space tourism (a relatively simple straight-up-and-down flight, as opposed to orbiting the Earth for longer periods) a viable business with the aim of allowing thousands of people to experience the adrenaline rush and sweeping views of our home planet that such flights can offer. Branson and Bezos are situated to become direct competitors in that industry, each offering tickets to wealthy customers for brief rides to the upper atmosphere aboard supersonic, rocket-powered spacecraft. Virgin Galactic moved into its facilities in New Mexico in May 2019 after years of delay. The glitzy building, called Spaceport America, was paid for with more than $200 million in mostly taxpayer money, and it had been waiting nearly a decade for Virgin Galactic to move in and open for business. The company refurbished the building to include a lounge and other amenities that ticket holders will be able to use before their brief journey to the edge of space. "You've got to remember that Virgin Galactic has people on every spaceflight... The fact that I'm willing to fly with those people shows confidence," Branson told CNN Business' Rachel Crane earlier this month. "I think the least the founder of the company can do is go up there and fly with his people." — Agencies
