Virgin Galactic Has Hundreds of Reservations After Founder Richard Branson's Ride into Space
Sir Richard Branson is celebrating his historic flight to the edge of space Sunday on his Virgin Galactic rocket plane, a major step forward for private spaceflight.
The nearly 71-year-old Branson and five crewmates from his Virgin Galactic space-tourism company reached an altitude of 53.5 miles (86 kilometers) over the New Mexico desert — enough to experience three to four minutes of weightlessness and witness the curvature of the Earth — and then glided back home to a runway landing.
"The whole thing, it was just magical," a jubilant Branson said on his return aboard the gleaming white space plane, named Unity.
"It's one of the best feelings of my life, and I've waited nearly 70 years for this and it's been a dream since I was a little boy building cardboard spaceships. And now to have had this wonderful team create this incredible spaceship and to have gone to space," he said.
Branson's flight helps open the door to space tourism. He became the first person to blast off in his own spaceship, beating Jeff Bezos, the richest person on the planet, by nine days. He also became the second septuagenarian to go into space. Astronaut John Glenn flew on the shuttle at age 77 in 1998.
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Bezos sent his congratulations, adding: "Can't wait to join the club!" — though he also took to Twitter a couple of days earlier to enumerate the ways in which he believes his company's tourist rides will be better.
Branson's other chief rival in the space-tourism race among the world's richest men, SpaceX's Elon Musk, came to New Mexico to watch and congratulated Branson for a "beautiful flight."
Bezos' Blue Origin company intends to send tourists past the so-called Karman line 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth, which is recognized by international aviation and aerospace federations as the threshold of space. Blue Origin is waiting for Bezos' flight before announcing its ticket prices.
NASA, the Air Force, the Federal Aviation Administration, and some astrophysicists consider the boundary between the atmosphere and space to begin 50 miles (80 kilometers) up.
Bezos plans to ride his own rocket into space from Texas on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Branson's brief, up-and-down flight — the space plane's portion took only about 15 minutes, or about as long as Alan Shepard's first U.S. spaceflight in 1961 — was a splashy and unabashedly commercial plug for Virgin Galactic, which plans to start taking paying customers on joyrides next year.
Virgin Galactic already has more than 600 reservations from would-be space tourists, with tickets initially costing $250,000 apiece. And upon his return to Earth, Branson announced a sweepstakes drawing for two seats on a Virgin Galactic jaunt.
"That was an amazing accomplishment," former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, a one-time commander of the International Space Station, said from the sidelines. "I'm just so delighted at what this open door is going to lead to now. It's a great moment."
As the private business expands further into space, Goldman Sachs and other analysts have said the first trillionaire will make his fortune from mining asteroids.
They believe that's the next frontier in the space business.
