Billionaire Richard Branson’s long-awaited test flight to space, taken alongside five of his Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. employees, bolsters the company’s plan to debut tourism trips next year.
The VSS Unity space plane detached from a carrier aircraft high over New Mexico and rocketed to a speed of Mach 3 on its way to an altitude of about 282,000 feet, or more than 53 miles (86 kilometers) above the Earth. The Unity then glided back through sunny skies and landed at about 9:38 a.m. local time on Sunday — approximately an hour after taking off.
"Welcome to the dawn of a new space age,” Branson told guests at the Spaceport America complex near the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He later said to reporters, "I was once a kid with a dream looking up to the stars and now I’m an adult in a spaceship looking back to our beautiful Earth.”