Virgin Galactic crew reaches edge of space in flight milestone
The first phase — getting to the Karman line at 80km above Earth — had Richard Branson in tears
Mojave — A Virgin Galactic rocket plane blasted to the edge of space on Thursday, capping off years of difficult testing to become the first US commercial human flight to reach space since America’s shuttle programme ended in 2011. The test flight foreshadows a new era of civilian space travel that could kick off as soon as 2019, with British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic battling other billionaire-backed ventures, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, to be the first to offer sub-orbital flights to fare-paying tourists. In the first steps before a high-altitude rocket launch, Virgin’s twin-fuselage carrier airplane holding the SpaceShipTwo passenger spacecraft took off soon after 7am local time from the Mojave Air and Space Port, about 145km north of Los Angeles. Richard Branson attended the take-off along with hundreds of spectators on a crisp morning in the California desert. After the rocket plane topped 80km altitude, a crying Branson high-fived and h...
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