Sir Richard Branson, the 70-year-old British founder of Virgin Galactic, blasted into space on Sunday morning aboard a Virgin Galactic aircraft and safely came home in a dramatic and expensive show.
The flight was rescheduled for 90 minutes later.
Because of overnight weather at Spaceport America in New Mexico, the trip was pushed back 90 minutes from its intended takeoff time, but they eventually took off at around 10:30 a.m. ET. Khalid released a new song called “New Normal” in honour of the webcast, which was hosted by Stephen Colbert. It took less than two hours to complete the journey.
According to The New York Times, Branson flew as a member of the crew and tested the cabin experience for future paying customers. Branson was joined by the pilots and three crew members, including Beth Moses, the chief astronaut instructor; Colin Bennett, the lead operations engineer; and Sirisha Bandla, the vice president of government affairs and research operations, on the rocket plane SpaceShipTwo.
According to Newsweek, Bandla is also working on a research project for the University of Florida. She is the second Indian-born woman and the third person of Indian heritage to exit the Earth’s atmosphere. Branson’s ambition of leveraging the private sector to deliver space travel to more people, she said in a promotional film, could “get people from all backgrounds, different geographies, different groups into space.” That is, assuming you can afford the hefty $250,000 ticket price.
The plane travels around 80 kilometres, or about 50 miles, into the upper atmosphere, which has some people asking if it counts as space. Although the United States regards 80 kilometres as the space frontier, there is no international agreement on where space begins. The riders will feel weightless at the top of the arc, but they will not be free of gravity, according to the New York Times. Instead, they’ll simply descend at the same speed as the plane, giving them the sensation of weightlessness.
