By Guy Taylor
Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has successfully completed its first commercial flight, taking paying customers to space after nearly two decades of preparation.
The British-billionaire’s spacecraft, VSS Unity, took off from Spaceport America in New Mexico at 4.04pm GMT this afternoon, carried under the wing of mothership VSS Eve.
After jetting nearly 50,000 ft, the VSS Unity dropped from under the belly of the parent aircraft less than half an hour later, before jetting six crew members and passengers into the edge of space.
Following a few minutes of weightlessness, the VSS Unity then began its descent back to Earth, touching back down at 4:44pm GMT.
The much-anticipated scientific research mission was crewed by researchers and passengers from the Italian Air Force, the National Research Council of Italy, as well as a former US Air Force Pilot and British astronaut instructor.
The mission, dubbed Galactic 01, represents a defining moment for the Branson brand, following the disastrous botched rocket launch and subsequent administration of his other space venture Virgin Orbit earlier in the year.
The company had been seeking to make history with the first ever satellite launch from the UK, but the LauncherOne rocket never made it to orbit.
Virgin Orbits stock plummeted on the announcement, and by April, the firm had collapsed – resulting in around 700 jobs lost.
The successful launch today was not enough to boost up Virgin Galactic’s stock, which tumbled 10 per cent on the news.
Greg Sadlier, from the space economics consultancy know.space, said today’s launch represented a critical moment for Virgin Galactic.
“At this stage of the nascent space tourism market, each and every spaceflight is significant (even those of one’s competitors) … but for Virgin Galactic, this first commercial suborbital spaceflight is especially important.”
Sadlier said that the successful launch would “allow Virgin Galactic to begin a regular cadence of commercial spaceflights – incredibly important for a privately-funded for-profit enterprise emerging from a prolonged test campaign.”
He added: “space tourism is an extremely small part of today’s global space economy, which contributes so many of the essential technologies that we rely on for our everyday lives.”
Today’s launch brings Branson’s Virgin Galactic into a small club of companies, alongside Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, who can all ferry paying customers to space.
The billionaires are jostling to get ahead in an ongoing space race, and Branson’s success looks set to heat up competition even further.
