Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson is on a mission to make traveling to space “more accessible to all”
This weekend he took a giant leap forward in making that goal a reality as he became the first person to ride into space aboard a rocket he helped fund. The supersonic space plane developed by his company, Virgin Galactic, took to the sky over New Mexico early Sunday – on board Branson and three fellow crewmembers. His fellow Virgin Galactic employees were Beth Moses, Colin Bennett, and Sirisha Bandla with pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci manning the SpaceShipTwo, a winged plane with a single rocket motor the company has spent nearly two decades developing.
Attached beneath its massive, twin-fuselage mothership, the vehicle took to the skies at 8:30 am MT and climbed to about 50,000 feet in the air. At the top of the flight path, it was suspended in weightlessness for a few minutes, allowing the passengers to enjoy panoramic views of the earth and space as SpaceShipTwo then flipped onto its belly and flew back into the Earth's thick atmosphere and glided back down to a runway landing. Branson's flight marks a huge leap forward for the commercial space industry.
Take a look at a clip from his epic first flight into space right here.
"To all you kids down there..." - @RichardBranson's message from zero gravity. #Unity22
— Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) July 11, 2021
Watch the livestream: https://t.co/5UalYT7Hjb pic.twitter.com/lYXHNsDQcU
