Sir Richard Branson, after nearly 17 years of development and over a billion of dollars invested in Virgin Galactic, achieved his dream and reached space.
Speaking from the spacecraft’s cabin, Branson called the spaceflight the “complete experience of a lifetime.”
The company’s spacecraft VSS Unity launched above the skies of New Mexico on Sunday, with two pilots guiding the vehicle carrying the billionaire founder and three Virgin Galactic employees. VSS Unity – after being released by a carrier aircraft called VMS Eve above 40,000 feet – fired its rocket engine and accelerated to faster than three times the speed of sound in a climb to the edge of space.
VSS Unity then performed a slow backflip in microgravity, when the Virgin Galactic crew was weightless and floated around the spacecraft cabin. The spacecraft reached an altitude of 86.1 kilometers (53.5 miles, or about 282,000 feet).
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