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Virgin Galactic’s first space tourists finally soar, an Olympian and a mother-daughter duo

Virgin Galactic rocketed to the edge of space with its first tourists Thursday, including a former British Olympian who bought his ticket 18 years ago and a mother-daughter duo from the Caribbean. (August 10) (Production Marissa Duhaney)

This photo provided Virgin Galactic shows passengers during Virgin Galactic’s first space tourism flight on Thursday Aug. 10, 2023. Virgin Galactic rocketed to the edge of space with its first tourists Thursday. The space plane glided back to a runway landing at Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, after a brief flight that gave passengers a few minutes of weightlessness.(Virgin Galactic via AP)

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Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered plane Unity 22, lands after a short flight to the edge of space at Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, N.M., Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023. Virgin Galactic is taking its first space tourists on a long-delayed rocket ship ride. (AP Photo/Andrés Leighton)

Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered plane Unity 22, left, flies past its mothership Eve on its way to the edge of space after taking off from Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, N.M., Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023. Virgin Galactic is taking its first space tourists on a long-delayed rocket ship ride. (AP Photo/Andrés Leighton)

Virgin Galactic’s mothership Eve, carrying the rocket-powered plane Unity 22, flies after taking off from Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, N.M., Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023. Virgin Galactic is taking its first space tourists on a long-delayed rocket ship ride. (AP Photo/Andrés Leighton)

Space tourists, from left, Anastatia Mayers, Jon Goodwin and Keisha Schahaff pose for photos before boarding their Virgin Galactic flight at Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, N.M., Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023. Virgin Galactic is taking its first space tourists on a long-delayed rocket ship ride. (AP Photo/Andrés Leighton)

Guests wave flags of Antigua and Barbuda while watching the return of Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered plane Unity at Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, N.M., Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023. Virgin Galactic is taking its first space tourists on a long-delayed rocket ship ride, including a British former Olympian and a mother-daughter duo from the Caribbean island. (AP Photo/Andrés Leighton)

Space tourists, from left, Anastatia Mayers, Jon Goodwin and Keisha Schahaff walk to the tarmac before boarding their Virgin Galactic flight at Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, N.M., Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023. Virgin Galactic is taking its first space tourists on a long-delayed rocket ship ride. (AP Photo/Andrés Leighton)

Virgin Galactic’s mothership Eve, carrying the rocket-powered plane Unity 22, takes off from Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, N.M., Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023. Virgin Galactic is taking its first space tourists on a long-delayed rocket ship ride. (AP Photo/Andrés Leighton)

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. (AP) — Virgin Galactic rocketed to the edge of space with its first tourists Thursday, a former British Olympian who bought his ticket 18 years ago and a mother-daughter duo from the Caribbean.

The space plane glided back to a runway landing at Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, after a brief flight that gave passengers a few minutes of weightlessness.

This first private customer flight had been delayed for years; its success means Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic can now start offering monthly rides, joining Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the space tourism business.

“That was by far the most awesome thing I’ve ever done in my life,” said Jon Goodwin, who competed in canoeing in the 1972 Olympics.

Goodwin, 80, was among the first to buy a Virgin Galactic ticket in 2005 and feared, after later being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, that he’d be out of luck. Since then he’s climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and cycled back down, and said he hopes his spaceflight shows others with Parkinson’s and other illnesses that ”it doesn’t stop you doing things.”

Ticket prices were $200,000 when Goodwin signed up. The cost is now $450,000.

He was joined on the flight by sweepstakes winner Keisha Schahaff, 46, a health coach from Antigua, and her daughter, Anastatia Mayers, 18, a student at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen. They high-fived and pumped their fists as the spaceport crowd cheered their return.

“A childhood dream has come true,” said Schahaff, who took pink Antiguan sand up with her. Added her daughter: “I have no words. The only thought I had the whole time was ‘Wow!’ ”

With the company’s astronaut trainer and one of the two pilots, it marked the first time women outnumbered men on a spaceflight, four to two.

Cheers erupted from families and friends watching below when the craft’s rocket motor fired after it was released from the twin-fuselage aircraft that had carried it aloft. The rocket ship’s portion of the flight lasted about 15 minutes and it reached 55 miles (88 kilometers) high.

It was Virgin Galactic’s seventh trip to space since 2018, but the first with a ticket-holder. Branson, the company’s founder, hopped on board for the first full-size crew ride in 2021. Italian military and government researchers soared in June on the first commercial flight. About 800 people are currently on Virgin Galactic’s waiting list, according to the company.

In contrast to Virgin Galactic’s plane-launched rocket ship, the capsules used by SpaceX and Blue Origin are fully automated and parachute back down.

Like Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin aims for the fringes of space, quick ups-and-downs from West Texas. Blue Origin has launched 31 people so far, but flights are on hold following a rocket crash last fall. The capsule, carrying experiments but no passengers, landed intact.

SpaceX, is the only private company flying customers all the way to orbit, charging a much heftier price, too: tens of millions of dollars per seat. It’s already flown three private crews. NASA is its biggest customer, relying on SpaceX to ferry its astronauts to and from the International Space Station. since 2020.

People have been taking on adventure travel for decades, the risks underscored by the recent implosion of the Titan submersible that killed five passengers on their way down to view the Titanic wreckage. Virgin Galactic suffered its own casualty in 2014 when its rocket plane broke apart during a test flight, killing one pilot. Yet space tourists are still lining up, ever since the first one rocketed into orbit in 2001 with the Russians.

Branson, who lives in the British Virgin Islands, watched Thursday’s flight from a party in Antigua. He was joined by the country’s prime minister, as well as Schahaff’s mother and other relatives.

“Welcome to the club,” he told the new spacefliers via X, formerly Twitter.

Several months ago, Branson held a virtual lottery to establish a pecking order for the company’s first 50 customers — dubbed the Founding Astronauts. Virgin Galactic said the group agreed Goodwin would go first, given his age and his Parkinson’s.

This story has been updated to correct introductory price to $200,000, not $250,000.

Dunn reported from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Highlights From Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Flight

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Branson and the crew received astronaut wings after their successful trip to space.

Richard Branson finally got his trip to space on Sunday.

It has been a very long wait for Mr. Branson, the irreverent, 70-year-old British billionaire who leads a galaxy of Virgin companies. In 2004, he founded Virgin Galactic to provide adventurous tourists with rides on rocket-powered planes to the edge of space and back.

At the time, he thought commercial service would begin in two to three years. Instead, close to 17 years have passed. Virgin Galactic says it still has three more test flights to conduct, including the one on Sunday, before it can be ready for paying passengers.

Cars drove Mr. Branson and his crewmates to the plane on Sunday, and the flight took off on Sunday morning around 10:40 a.m. Eastern time from Spaceport America in New Mexico, about 180 miles south of Albuquerque.

The space plane separated from the carrier ship around 11:25 a.m. and ignited its engine for about 60 seconds, carrying Mr. Branson and the crew into space. Video footage from the live stream showed him and the crew experiencing weightlessness.

Minutes later, the plane began its return to Earth in a glide, and soon landed safely on the spaceport’s runway. Mr. Branson, speaking into a camera in the plane’s cabin during the glide, called it “an experience of a lifetime.”

More than an hour later, a giddy Mr. Branson took a stage with his fellow crewmates.

“The whole thing was magical,” he said.

Chris Hadfield , the Canadian astronaut whose performance of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” from the space station went viral some years ago, then pinned wings on the crewmates’ flight suits that officially designate them as astronauts.

— Kenneth Chang

What is Virgin Galactic’s space plane, and what did it do?

The rocket plane, a type called SpaceShipTwo, is about the size of an executive jet. In addition to the two pilots, there can be up to four people in the cabin. The particular SpaceShipTwo that flew on Sunday is named V.S.S. Unity.

To get off the ground, Unity was carried by a larger plane to an altitude of about 50,000 feet. There, Unity was released, and the rocket plane’s motor ignited. The acceleration made people on board feel a force up to 3.5 times their normal weight on the way to an altitude of more than 50 miles.

At the top of the arc, those on board were able to see the blackness of space as well as the curve of Earth from the plane’s windows. They also got out of their seats and experienced about four minutes of apparent weightlessness. Fifty miles up, Earth’s downward gravitational pull is essentially just as strong as it is on the ground; rather, the passengers were falling at the same pace as the plane around them.

The two tail booms at the back of the space plane then rotated up to a “feathered” configuration that created more drag and stability, allowing the plane to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere more gently. This configuration SpaceShipTwo like a badminton shuttlecock, which always falls with the pointy side oriented down, than a plane.

Still, the forces felt by the passengers on the way down were greater than on the way up, reaching six times the force of gravity.

Once the plane was back in the atmosphere, the tail booms rotated back down, and the plane glided to a landing.

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What will it cost to fly Virgin Galactic to space?

Not long after Richard Branson re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday, he and other employees of his Virgin Galactic venture boasted that the company would greatly expand opportunities for the general public to travel to space. For the moment, those otherworldly views and feelings of weightlessness will still be held in rarefied air.

A seat on one of the company’s spaceships originally cost $200,000 . The company later raised the price to $250,000 . It then stopped sales after a crash during a test flight in 2014. When the company resumes sales later this year, the price will probably rise again, said Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic’s chief executive.

“We’re here to make space more accessible to all,” Mr. Branson said on Sunday as he was presented with his astronaut wings after his milestone flight.

For a vast majority of Americans, the cost of such a trip is out of reach. In the future, Virgin Galactic and other spaceflight companies hope broadening opportunities to fly to space will bring down the cost of a ticket. But for now, primarily people with spare cash equivalent to the cost of some houses will be able to afford a few moments at the edge of space.

Nevertheless, the company estimated on Sunday that more than 600 people from some 60 countries had signed up for one of its flights. The first paying SpaceShipTwo passengers may begin flying in the next year, after the company completes two more test flights.

During Virgin Galactic’s livestream on Sunday, some space tourists-in-waiting spoke about how they were looking forward to taking the flights. They had been invited to watch Mr. Branson’s flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico. There was no discussion of the steep cost associated with space travel, which is not limited to Virgin Galactic.

An unnamed passenger paid $28 million to join the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos later this month when his rocket company, Blue Origin, is to launch its New Shepard rocket and capsule. The company has yet to announce the standard fare for a trip on its spacecraft when Mr. Bezos isn’t in the next seat.

While the price of a brief suborbital trip with Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin is expensive, trips even higher to orbit and beyond are downright, well, astronomical.

Three people paid $55 million each to Axiom Space in Houston to fly in SpaceX ’s Crew Dragon to the International Space Station as soon as early next year.

But not all trajectories to space will involve six or seven figures. On Sunday, Mr. Branson announced that Virgin Galactic would give away two tickets to space as part of a sweepstakes initiative with the charitable fund-raising platform Omaze.

No donation is required to win, according to Omaze, which said that a nonprofit organization, Space for Humanity, would seek to “democratize space and send citizen astronauts of diverse racial, economic and disciplinary backgrounds to space.”

“If you ever had a dream, now is the time to make it come true,” Mr. Branson said.

— Neil Vigdor and Kenneth Chang

Who were the crew members aboard the flight?

The pilots are David Mackay and Michael Masucci.

In addition to Mr. Branson, three Virgin Galactic employees joined the flight to evaluate how the experience will be for future paying customers. They were Beth Moses, the chief astronaut instructor; Colin Bennett, lead operations engineer; and Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs and research operations.

On Sunday’s flight, Ms. Bandla was to conduct an experiment from the University of Florida that looks at how plants react to the changing conditions — particularly the swings in gravity — during the flight, part of research that could aid growing food on future long-duration space missions.

Stephen Colbert added a dash of comedy as Branson and crew headed toward space.

In this billionaire space race, slipping the surly bonds of Earth apparently isn’t enough — not without some glitz and a bevy of celebrities.

Richard Branson combined private spaceflight with show business on Sunday as he completed his highly-anticipated Virgin Galactic flight high above the New Mexico desert. He enlisted “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert to introduce segments of a live streamed production, which was delayed around 90 minutes by the weather.

Mr. Colbert played up a humorous rivalry he has cultivated with the entrepreneur on his talk shows over the years, and joked about some of Mr. Branson’s failed business ventures, like Virgin Cola.

“Seriously, he lost money selling sugar water,” Mr. Colbert quipped. “All aboard.”

Later in the production, the Grammy-winning artist Khalid gave a performance in front of a small crowd on an outdoor stage at Spaceport America, which featured the release of his new song, “New Normal.” The musician, appearing in a sequined jacket as machines sprayed mist on a stage, performed three songs.

“Look how far we’ve came just as humanity,” he said during the live steam.

Around two hours before lifting off, Mr. Branson shared a photo of himself with a shoeless Elon Musk, a billionaire rival in the private conquest of space.

“Great to start the morning with a friend,” Mr. Branson said on Twitter .

In England, where he was knighted by Prince Charles in 2000 , the spotlight did not entirely belong to Mr. Branson, however. Mr. Branson’s space odyssey coincided with the men’s tennis final at Wimbledon on Sunday — historically billed for U.S. television audiences as “breakfast at Wimbledon.”

The flight also came just hours before England was set to take on Italy in the soccer finals of Euro 2020, which has drawn the collective attention of many people in Britain. Some on social media suggested that Mr. Branson’s timing was less than ideal .

The live stream production was not without its hiccups. The show’s hosts tried to interview Mr. Branson when the plane reached space, but the audio feed wasn’t working. After re-entry, many of his words were garbled as he tried to describe what it was like to visit space.

An earlier version of this article, using information from a Virgin Galactic video, misstated the day that Richard Branson was riding a bicycle to Spaceport America in New Mexico. He was riding it on July 5, not July 11, the day of his flight to space.

How we handle corrections

— Neil Vigdor

Why did Richard Branson take this risk?

Founding a space exploration company was perhaps an unsurprising step for Mr. Branson, who has made a career — and a fortune estimated at $6 billion — building flashy upstart businesses that he promotes with a showman’s flair.

What became his Virgin business empire began with a small record shop in central London in the 1970s before Mr. Branson parlayed it into Virgin Records, the home of acts like the Sex Pistols, Peter Gabriel and more. In 1984, he co-founded what became Virgin Atlantic to challenge British Airways in the field of long-haul passenger air travel. Other Virgin-branded airlines followed.

The Virgin Group branched out into other businesses as well, including a mobile-phone carrier, a passenger railroad and a line of hotels. Not all have performed flawlessly: Both Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Australia filed for insolvency during the pandemic last year, while few today remember his ventures into soft drinks , cosmetics or lingerie .

Virgin Galactic was announced to much fanfare in 2004 with the promise of creating a space tourism company with style. Virgin Orbit, a spinoff of that company that launches small satellites from a jumbo jet, came 13 years later. Virgin Orbit, now separate from Virgin Galactic, has carried payloads to orbit twice this year.

The space tourism company is of a piece with Mr. Branson’s penchant for highflying pursuits like skydiving and hot-air ballooning. And unlike many of the Virgin Group’s businesses that are actually minority investments or simply licensees, Virgin Galactic has been a major focus of Mr. Branson’s. He raised $1 billion for the space companies from Saudi Arabia, only to call off the deal in 2018 after the killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And in a regulatory filing, the company said it had benefited from his “personal network to generate new inquiries and reservation sales, as well as referrals from existing reservation holders.”

“We’ve spent 14 years working on our space program,” Mr. Branson said in a Bloomberg Television interview in 2018. “And it’s been tough, and space is tough — it’s rocket science.” He added that he had hoped to travel on one of Virgin Galactic’s flights by the end of that year.

Virgin Galactic joined the New York Stock Exchange in 2019 after merging with a publicly traded investment fund, giving it a potent source of new funds to compete with deep-pocket competitors — and publicity, with Mr. Branson marking its trading debut at the exchange in one of the company’s flight suits.

But while Virgin Galactic has sought to keep pace with the likes of Mr. Bezos’ Blue Origin, Mr. Branson has downplayed any rivalry between the two. “I know nobody will believe me when I say it, but honestly, there isn’t,” he told The Today Show earlier this week.

— Michael J. de la Merced

Is Virgin Galactic’s space plane safe?

The federal government does not impose regulations for the safety of passengers on a spacecraft like Virgin Galactic’s. Unlike commercial passenger jetliners, the rocket plane has not been certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. Indeed, the F.A.A. is prohibited by law from issuing any such requirements until 2023.

The rationale is that emerging space companies like Virgin Galactic need a “learning period” to try out designs and procedures and that too much regulation too soon would stifle innovation that would lead to better, more efficient designs.

Future passengers will have to sign forms acknowledging “informed consent” to the risks, similar to what you sign if you go skydiving or bungee jumping.

What the F.A.A. does regulate is ensuring safety for people not on the plane — that is, if anything does go wrong, that the risk to the “uninvolved public” on ground is minuscule.

The Virgin Galactic design already has an imperfect safety record. The company’s first space plane, the V.S.S. Enterprise, crashed during a test flight in 2014 when the co-pilot moved a lever too early during the flight, allowing the tail booms to rotate when they should have remained rigid. The Enterprise broke apart, and the co-pilot, Michael Alsbury, was killed. The pilot, Peter Siebold, survived after parachuting out of the plane.

The controls were redesigned so that the tail booms cannot be unlocked prematurely.

In 2019, Virgin Galactic came close to another catastrophe when a new metal thermal protection film was improperly installed, covering up holes that allow air trapped inside a horizontal stabilizer — the small horizontal wing on the tail of a plane — to flow out as the craft rises into the rarefied layers of the atmosphere. Instead, the pressure of the trapped air ruptured a seal along one of the stabilizers.

The mishap was revealed earlier this year in the book “Test Gods” by Nicholas Schmidle, a staff writer at The New Yorker. The book quotes Todd Ericson, then the vice president for safety and testing at Virgin Galactic, saying, “I don’t know how we didn’t lose the vehicle and kill three people.”

Who are some of the future passengers?

More than 600 people have signed up for flights. Virgin Galactic originally charged $200,000 a seat and then raised the price to $250,000 before suspending sales after the 2014 crash. The company has not said what it will charge when it resumes sales, but the expectation is that the cost will be higher.

During earlier test flights, the Virgin Galactic plane carried scientific experiments. One from University of Florida scientists, for example, tested imaging technologies that capture the reaction of plants — which genes are turned on and off — to the stresses of spaceflight.

In the future, scientists will be able to accompany their experiments. On this flight, Ms. Bandla of Virgin Galactic will perform an experiment that requires handling several tubes during the trip.

The Italian Air Force has purchased seats on future flights for scientific research, as has the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. It will be much easier, faster and cheaper to fly experiments on suborbital flights than to get them to the International Space Station.

Why do all of these passengers get to be called astronauts?

The United States Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration put the boundary of outer space at 50 miles. The F.A.A. has granted astronaut wings to Virgin Galactic crew members who flew on earlier test flights.

Internationally, however, the altitude that marks the start of space is usually set at 100 kilometers, or just over 62 miles, what is known as the Karman line.

SpaceShipTwo was originally intended to rise above the 62-mile altitude, but difficulties during the development of the motor led to a less powerful but more reliable design that cannot propel the spacecraft that high.

When is Jeff Bezos’ flight, and how is it different?

On July 20, another billionaire is scheduled to take another rocket to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, founded his rocket company, Blue Origin , with a vision of millions of people living and working in space in the future.

But the company’s first vehicle, New Shepard, has much more modest ambitions. Like Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, it is designed to take people on short suborbital trips providing about four minutes of weightlessness.

Unlike SpaceShipTwo, New Shepard is a more traditional rocket, launched upward before the capsule detaches from a booster rocket. The booster returns to make a vertical landing, much as the larger Falcon 9 rockets operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX do, while the capsule descends back to the ground under a parachute.

New Shepard also rises above the 62-mile-high Karman line.

Blue Origin highlighted this fact, and several other features of New Shepard, in a tweet on Friday that compared the spacecraft with Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo.

From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name. For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line. pic.twitter.com/QRoufBIrUJ — Blue Origin (@blueorigin) July 9, 2021

Mr. Bezos later wished Mr. Branson and Virgin Galactic “a successful and safe flight tomorrow,” in a post on his Instagram account . He added, “Best of luck!”

What else is going on in private spaceflight?

TV and film projects in orbit are attracting the greatest attention so far. In the year ahead, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, and a Russian broadcaster, Channel One, are behind an effort in the year ahead to send Yulia Peresild, an actress, and Klim Shipenko, a filmmaker, to the space station to make the movie “Challenge.” Ms. Peresild will play a surgeon sent to orbit to save the life of a Russian astronaut.

They will fly on a Russian Soyuz rocket. So will a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, Yusaku Maezawa , and Yozo Hirano, a production assistant. Their 12-day trip, scheduled to launch in December, is a prelude for a more ambitious around-the-moon trip Mr. Maezawa hopes to embark on in a few years in the giant SpaceX Starship rocket that is currently in development. His trip to the space station is being arranged by Space Adventures, a company that arranged eight similar visits for private citizens between 2001 and 2009.

The Discovery Channel has announced a reality TV show, “Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?” in which the winner gets to travel to the International Space Station. The eight-episode show, in development, is to run next year.

SpaceX has a couple of missions in the next 12 months that are scheduled to take private citizens to orbit . One is scheduled to launch in September and will carry Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments, and three other amateur astronauts , on a trip to orbit. A second, booked by the company Axiom Space, will carry three wealthy individuals and an astronaut working for the company to the International Space Station.

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All aboard! Virgin Galactic flies its first tourists to the edge of space

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Virgin Galactic rocketed to the edge of space with its first tourists Thursday, including a former British Olympian who bought his ticket 18 years ago and a mother-daughter duo from the Caribbean.

The space plane glided back to a runway landing at Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, after a brief flight that gave passengers a few minutes of weightlessness.

Cheers erupted from families and friends watching from below when the craft’s rocket motor fired after it was released from the plane that had carried it aloft. The rocket ship reached about 55 miles high.

Richard Branson’s company expects to begin offering monthly trips to customers on its winged space plane, joining Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the space tourism business .

Column: In billionaires’ space race, tourism is a sideshow to quest for moon landing contracts

Branson, Bezos and Musk say their space companies are commercial entities aimed at tourism, but its government contracts they really want.

July 13, 2021

Virgin Galactic passenger Jon Goodwin , who was among the first to buy a ticket in 2005, said he had faith that he would someday make the trip. The 80-year-old athlete — he competed in canoeing in the 1972 Olympics — has Parkinson’s disease and wants to be an inspiration to others.

“I hope it shows them that these obstacles can be the start rather than the end to new adventures,” he said in a statement.

Ticket prices were $200,000 when Goodwin signed up. The cost is now $450,000.

He was joined by sweepstakes winner Keisha Schahaff , 46, a health coach from Antigua, and her daughter, Anastatia Mayers , 18, a student at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen. Also on board: two pilots and the company’s astronaut trainer.

It was Virgin Galactic’s seventh trip to space since 2018, but the first with a ticket-holder. Branson, the company’s founder, hopped on board for the first full-size crew ride in 2021. Italian military and government researchers soared in June on the first commercial flight . About 800 people are currently on Virgin Galactic’s waiting list, according to the company.

Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic crew go to the edge of space and back

Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson celebrated on Sunday after successfully going to suborbital space on a crewed flight.

July 11, 2021

Virgin Galactic’s rocket ship launches from the belly of an airplane, not from the ground, and requires two pilots in the cockpit. Once the mothership reaches about 50,000 feet (10 miles), the space plane is released and fires its rocket motor to make the final push to just over 50 miles up. Passengers can unstrap from their seats, float around the cabin for a few minutes and take in the sweeping views of Earth, before the space plane glides back home and lands on a runway.

In contrast, the capsules used by SpaceX and Blue Origin are fully automated and parachute back down.

Like Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin aims for the fringes of space, quick ups-and-downs from West Texas. Blue Origin has launched 31 people so far, but flights are on hold following a rocket crash last fall. The capsule, carrying experiments but no passengers, landed intact.

SpaceX is the only private company flying customers all the way to orbit, charging a much heftier price, too: tens of millions of dollars per seat. It’s already flown three private crews. NASA is its biggest customer, relying on SpaceX to ferry its astronauts to and from the International Space Station since 2020.

Jeff Bezos launches new era of space travel with Blue Origin ride

Following Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson to the edge of space, Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos ushered in the era of lower-cost commercial spaceflight -- or so many scientists and would-be astro-tourists hope.

July 20, 2021

People have been taking on adventure travel for decades, the risks underscored by the recent implosion of the Titan submersible that killed five passengers on their way down to view the Titanic wreckage. Virgin Galactic suffered its own casualty in 2014 when its rocket plane broke apart during a test flight, killing one pilot. Yet space tourists are still lining up, ever since the first one rocketed into orbit in 2001 with the Russians.

Branson, who lives in the British Virgin Islands, watched Thursday’s flight from a party in Antigua. He had held a virtual lottery to establish a pecking order for the company’s first 50 customers — dubbed the Founding Astronauts. Virgin Galactic said the group agreed Goodwin would go first, given his age and his Parkinson’s.

Dunn reported from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

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Virgin Galactic successfully flies tourists to space for first time

Six individuals were aboard VSS Unity space plane, including first mother-daughter duo to venture to space together

Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, the reusable rocket-powered space plane carrying the company’s first crew of tourists to space, successfully launched and landed on Thursday.

The mission, known as Galactic 02, took off shortly after 11am ET from Spaceport America in New Mexico .

Aboard the spacecraft were six individuals total – the space plane’s commander and former Nasa astronaut CJ Sturckow, the pilot Kelly Latimer, as well as Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor who trained the crew before the flight.

The spacecraft also carryied three private passengers, including the health and wellness coach Keisha Schahaff and her 18-year-old daughter, Anastasia Mayers, both of whom are Antiguan.

According to Space.com, Schahaff won her seat onboard the Galactic 02 as part of a fundraising competition by Space for Humanity, a non-profit organization seeking to democratize space travel. Mayers is studying philosophy and physics at Aberdeen University in Scotland. Together, Schahaff and Mayers are the first mother-daughter duo to venture to space together.

“When I was two years old, just looking up to the skies, I thought, ‘How can I get there?’ But, being from the Caribbean, I didn’t see how something like this would be possible. The fact that I am here, the first to travel to space from Antigua, shows that space really is becoming more accessible,” Schahaff said in a statement last month.

The mission also marks the most women flown in a single mission to space.

Onboard the flight was also the former Olympian Jon Goodwin, who participated in the 1972 Olympics in Munich as a canoeist. At 80 years old, Goodwin was the second passenger with Parkinson’s disease and the first Olympian to embark on a trip to space.

“When I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2014, I was determined not to let it stand in the way of living life to the fullest. And now for me to go to space with Parkinson’s is completely magical,” he said in a news release. “I hope this inspires all others facing adversity and shows them that challenges don’t have to inhibit or stop them from pursuing their dreams,” Goodwin said .

Galactic 02 is a suborbital flight. However, despite VSS Unity not reaching orbit, the trajectory allows passengers to experience several minutes of weightlessness at an altitude high enough for them to see the Earth’s curvature, Space.com explains .

Following liftoff, Virgin Galactic’s carrier plane VMS Eve transported VSS Unity to an altitude of about 44,300ft. Eve then dropped Unity, which then fired its own rocket motor and ascended to suborbital space. Passengers onboard experienced approximately 3Gs.

Live footage inside the spacecraft showed the passengers unstrapping themselves from their seats and peering out down to Earth through the windows as they floated throughout the spacecraft.

In a press conference after the flight, Schahaff recounted her experience, saying: “Looking at Earth was the most amazing … It was so comfortable. It really was the best ride ever. I would love to do this again.

“This experience has given me this beautiful feeling that if I can do this, I can do anything,” she added.

Mayers, who is the second-youngest person to go to space, said: “I was shocked at the things that you feel. You are so much more connected to everything than you would expect to be. You felt like a part of the team, a part of the ship, a part of the universe, a part of Earth. It was incredible and I’m still starstruck.”

To Goodwin, the experience was far more dramatic than he expected.

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“The pure acceleration, Mach 3 [2,301mph, 3,378 ft per second] in eight and a half seconds was completely surreal. The re-entry was a lot more dramatic than I imagined it would be. In fact, I would have said it was out of control if I didn’t know anything different,” he said.

“It was a completely surreal experience. But the most impressive thing was looking at Earth from space. The pure clarity was very moving, quite surreal. It was without a doubt the most exciting day of my life,” he added.

In a statement released following the flight, Sturckow said: “It is a surreal and humbling experience to have flown Unity today. The wonder and excitement of spaceflight never loses its magic.”

Latimer echoed similar sentiments, saying: “In my entire career, from the Air Force Academy to being a test pilot for Nasa, nothing tops what I have just experienced at the controls of VSS Unity. Going to space today fulfilled an ambition I’ve had since I was a child.”

The Virgin Galactic founder, Sir Richard Branson, also hailed the flight, tweeting: “Today we flew three incredible private passengers to space: Keisha Schahaff, Anastatia Mayers and Jon Goodwin. Congratulations Virgin Galactic commercial astronauts 011, 012 and 013 – welcome to the club!”

Despite Galactic 02 being Virgin Galactic’s second commercial spaceflight mission, it is the first flight to carry private customers. In June, Galactic 01 carried three crew members from the Italian air force and the National Research Council of Italy.

In July 2021, Branson traveled to space and back onboard the VSS Unity, a mission that marked the billionaire’s entry into the new era of space tourism helmed by other billionaires including the SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, and Blue Origin founder, Jeff Bezos.

According to Virgin Galactic, the company has already booked a backlog of about 800 customers. Tickets have ranged from $250,000 to $450,000.

Galactic 03, the company’s third commercial spaceflight, is planned for September.

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Virgin Galactic's rocket reaches edge of space with Richard Branson on board

Richard Branson has some new bragging rights.

Branson, the British entrepreneur, earned his astronaut wings Sunday after flying to the edge of space aboard a rocket-powered vehicle developed by his space tourism company, Virgin Galactic . The test flight — Virgin Galactic's first expedition with a full crew — is a major boost for the company, which aims to start commercial flights with paying customers next year.

In a live broadcast during the vehicle's descent, Branson called the trip an "experience of a lifetime."

Branson's trip edges out that of fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who plans a similar feat July 20 aboard a rocket and capsule designed by his own space company, Blue Origin. Although Branson, 70, has shrugged off notions that he's competing with Bezos, the timing of the two flights is the culmination of a yearslong rivalry among Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and other companies vying for a leg up in the burgeoning space tourism industry.

Branson's flight was a suborbital jaunt, so rather than reach orbit and circle the Earth, the vehicle flew to the edge of space, at an altitude of more than 50 miles, where passengers experienced about four minutes of weightlessness before they returned to the ground. On previous test flights, the winged craft has reached an altitude of around 55 miles.

Virgin Galactic's flights launch from Spaceport America, along a desolate stretch of desert in New Mexico. The company's SpaceShipTwo Unity craft is designed to take off on a conventional runway while attached to the underbelly of a carrier ship known as WhiteKnightTwo. The vehicles fly to 50,000 feet, where Unity is released and its engine ignites to rocket to the edge of space.

Branson's flight took off Sunday morning at around 10:30 ET. The launch time was delayed by around 90 minutes because of overnight weather conditions at Spaceport America.

Branson was joined by pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci and three mission specialists, all of whom are employees of Virgin Galactic: chief astronaut instructor Beth Moses, lead operations engineer Colin Bennett and government affairs Vice President Sirisha Bandla.

Virgin Galactic is expected to conduct several more test flights before it begins commercial operations with private customers next year. The company has said the suborbital joyrides are likely to cost more than $250,000 each, but final pricing has not yet been announced.

Virgin Galactic's progress — as is the case with much of the private spaceflight industry — has taken years longer than had been expected. The company, which Branson founded in 2004, suffered a high-profile setback in 2014 when its first-generation SpaceShipTwo crashed in the Mojave Desert in California during a test flight, killing one of the two pilots.

"It's taken 17 years to get to this flight, and of course a lot of personal wealth has been poured into it, but it also shows that this takes tenacity," said Greg Autry, a space policy expert at Arizona State University.

In addition to space tourism, Branson's business empire includes Virgin Orbit, which launches satellites from a modified Boeing 747 aircraft that flies over the Mojave Desert.

The flight adds more fuel to rivalries among the billionaire players within the private spaceflight industry. Until now, commercial launches have been dominated by Elon Musk's company, SpaceX, which has been ferrying cargo ships to and from the International Space Station and flew NASA astronauts to the orbiting lab last year.

SpaceX plans other orbital tourism flights, including the first mission to space with an all-civilian crew .

Meanwhile, Bezos plans his own trip to suborbital space on July 20, when he is set to launch the first operational flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket and capsule.

The New Shepard launches vertically from a site in the Texas desert, southeast of El Paso. While their takeoffs are different, Bezos' trip is expected to be similar to Branson's, even though Blue Origin's capsule can reach higher altitudes than Virgin Galactic's Unity craft. That has become a point of contention, with Blue Origin suggesting that Branson's flight wouldn't officially reach space.

The edge of space is often defined by the so-called Kármán line, at 62 miles. Unlike Unity, the New Shepard capsule is designed to fly above the Kármán line, even though the Federal Aviation Administration and the Air Force recognize a lower boundary for the edge of space, at 50 miles.

Bezos will be joined on his flight by his brother, Mark Bezos, and Wally Funk, 82, a former test pilot who was one of the Mercury 13 women who underwent training in the 1960s to demonstrate that women can meet NASA's standards for its astronaut corps. An unidentified passenger who paid more than $28 million in an online auction for the last seat will round out the four-person crew.

Denise Chow is a reporter for NBC News Science focused on general science and climate change.

Virgin Galactic launch recap: A spectacular flight with a textbook landing

• Virgin Galactic successfully flew and landed its first space-tourism mission.
• The passengers were Olympian Jon Goodwin and mother-daughter duo Keisha Schahaff and Anastatia Mayers.
• The mission advanced Virgin Galactic's growing presence in the spaceflight industry.

Virgin Galactic has launched its first tourist passengers — Olympian Jon Goodwin and mother-daughter duo Keisha Schahaff and Anastatia Mayers — to the edge of space and back. 

The flight, called Galactic 02 , lifted off from Spaceport America in New Mexico and took the three passengers to 55 miles above Earth's surface where they experienced weightlessness as they looked out of the ship's many windows into space.

Space tourism holds great promise for the company.

The next flights will be soon, but it's unclear exactly how the average person can book a seat

After today's flight, monthly space flights are expected to continue into the foreseeable future, Virgin Galactic said . 

Although the company has not yet revealed who will be on the next flight, interested parties can sign up for email notifications to learn more about the "Virgin Galactic experience" and if there are tickets available for future excursions. According to the company's FAQ page , tickets are sold "first-come, first-serve."

Virgin Galactic promotes the "overview effect" as a way to "deepen your connection to Earth and to humanity," but space travel is terrible for the environment (and thus humanity)

Virgin Galactic's website touts participation in its travel as a way to find a new perspective on humanity itself — but that reflection comes at the cost of the environment. 

A 2022 report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that debris put into the stratosphere from rocket launching does impact the climate and contributes to year-round ozone loss in the Northern Hemisphere. The report also noted that increasing rocket launch emissions scale "in a near linear fashion" with climate response and changes. 

Though not currently a leading cause of pollutants, were space tourism to gain popularity, the impacts on the environment could be significant. 

Even though they're not making a huge profit yet, Virgin's revenue is up compared to last year.

The company has had a hard time making much profit since they were founded. It's expensive to fund research into spaceflight and it takes quite a while to even get crafts into the air. 

But with the success of its first successful missions to the edge of space so far this year, things are looking up for Virgin Galactic. 

In its second quarter earnings report, Virgin Galactic attributed an increase in quarterly revenue from $357,000 in 2022 to $1,871,000 this year to its commercial spaceflight endeavors.

This was the view from the top of the VSS Unity's flight.

That's what it looks like from the space plane more than 290,000 feet above Earth.

Each space-flyer took personal mementos of the people they love with them

During a press conference following the flight, each of the passengers shared what items they brought to remind them of home.

Mayers brought a ring from her boyfriend, a pin from her university, and photos of the most important people in her life. "Since I couldn't take them with me physically, I took them in photos," she said.  

Schahaff took a crystal bracelet her husband gave her, a necklace from her best friend, a picture of her parents and daughter, some crystals, and pink sand from Antigua and Barbuda.

Goodwin brought a picture of his grandson, four rings from his wife, and a badge of his canoe club. 

Goodwin hopes that his space flight will help other people with Parkinson's

When he first signed up for the Virgin Galactic space flight in 2005, Goodwin didn't have Parkinson's. He thought his later diagnosis would be the end of his space dreams, he said in a press conference. 

But the company was able to keep his dreams alive after going through rigorous check-ups, he said. 

"I'm hoping that I instill in other people around the world, as well as people with Parkinson's, that it doesn't stop you from doing things that are out of the normal if you've got some illness that's inflicted you. I just hope that good comes out of that," he said.

Mayers says she had "second thoughts" about the flight last night. Schahaff says she only got two or three hours of sleep.

"It was like oh my god I'm doing this," Mayers said. "But this morning I woke up and sat in my bed and I was like, I'm ready. I just felt it in myself that there was nothing else I wanted to do but this right now."

Schahaff added that she looked at the stars and "it felt like the universe was connecting with me again and says 'you're invited, come."

"I was shocked at the things that you feel," Mayers said in a press conference after the flight. "You are so much more connected to everything than you would expect to be."

"You felt like a part of the team, a part of the ship, a part of the universe, a part of Earth. It was incredible and I am still starstruck," she said.

Astronauts call this the "overview effect." It's a sense of deep awe and connection that people sometimes feel when viewing Earth from above for the first time.

Goodwin says falling back to Earth was so dramatic it felt like it was "out of control."

"The reentry was a lot more dramatic than I thought it would be. In fact, I would've said it was out of control if I didn't know different," Olympian Jon Goodwin said in the press conference, describing his experience to the edge of space.

Virgin Galactic is holding a press conference at 2 p.m. ET, with a livestream on Youtube.

Today was pilot Kelly Latimer's first trip to the edge of space, too.

"In my entire career, from the Air Force Academy to being a test pilot for NASA, nothing tops what I have just experienced at the controls of VSS Unity," Latimer said in a press release from Virgin Galactic.

"Going to space today fulfilled an ambition I've had since I was a child. It is a privilege to be part of a majority-women crew making history as the most female astronauts flying to space in a single mission."

Richard Branson tells the Galactic 02 passengers: “welcome to the club!”

—Richard Branson (@richardbranson) August 10, 2023

Fewer than 700 people have been to space. There's some debate about whether Virgin Galactic's flights count as going to space, since they do not fly past the Kármán line, which is sometimes considered the threshold of space at 62 miles above sea level.

However, the FAA and NASA have recognized people as astronauts when they've flown above 50 miles, as Branson did aboard the VSS Unity in 2021 and the Galactic 02 crew did today.

Virgin Galactic's long road into spaceflight

When Virgin Galactic was founded in 2004, it aimed to send its first passengers into space by 2008. Now, 19 years later, we've just witnessed its second commercial flight. 

The company's history is paved with these kinds of pock marks, from fatalities during early testing , to a bevy of red tape problems.

In 2007, three contractors were killed during an engine test. Then in 2014, an untimely unlocking of the craft's feathering system caused it to break apart mid-flight, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another. 

The next iteration of the space plane, called the VSS Unity, which flew today, has only had successful flights. Pilots flew it to the edge of space and back three times to test it.

Then the company launched its billionaire founder, Richard Branson , in 2021. He narrowly beat Jeff Bezos to the edge of space. 

That flight garnered a lot of publicity — from Stephen Colbert hosting the livestream to Elon Musk paying Branson a 2:30 a.m. visit — but that wasn't the end of Virgin Galactic's troubles. Because the flight deviated from the planned path, Virgin was put under investigation by the US Federal Aviation Administration. 

The company was eventually cleared , but took the rest of 2022 to update its spacecraft and fight off legal battles. That represented some $400 million dollars of cash lost, Fortune reported . 

The success of Galactic 01 earlier this year and today's successful mission may be a sign that tides are turning for the company.

The pilots applied the brakes and brought the VSS Unity to a stop.

The passengers applauded inside the cabin.

Touchdown! The VSS Unity is cruising down the 12,000-foot-long, 200-foot-wide runway back on Earth.

A quick shot of the passengers shows everybody buckled in for the glide back to Earth.

After screaming to the edge of space and experiencing weightlessness, the crew eventually started to descend back to Earth and buckled in for their return.

An altitude tracker on the livestream showed a peak of 290,420 feet.

The passengers reached a peak altitude of 290,420 feet before descending on their way back to Earth.

The passengers are unbuckled, floating in zero gravity, at the peak of their flight.

The space plane is predicted to peak at 289,000 feet above sea level.

The VSS Unity separates from its mothership and fires its engines.

The space plane is pointed upwards, at Mach 2, headed toward space.

Screaming fans wave national flags at a watch party on the island of Antigua.

The livestream cut to Antigua, where a large and loud watch party is gathered outside. Passengers Anastatia Mayers and Keisha Schahaff are the first people from Antigua and Barbuda to travel to the edge of space.

A sneak peek inside the space plane's cabin shows the passengers waiting for a big drop.

The three passengers and Virgin Galactic's astronaut trainer, Beth Moses, are buckled into their seats, each with their own window as the mothership carries them through the first leg of their journey. They're waiting for the mothership to drop them so they can scream toward space.

Virgin Galactic is barely breaking even with its upcoming $250,000-a-seat flights

For its second quarter this year, Virgin Galactic posted a net loss of $134.4 million, compared to a $110.7 million loss in the same period last year, CNBC reported . 

The next two quarters are expected to be equally slim, with the company announcing projected revenues of $1 million each. Despite that, the company is launching its second commercial flight today. 

But it's not making as much money as it could from this launch, which may be some of the reasons Virgin Galactic is barely breaking even.

Of the 800 tickets sold thus far, three quarters have gone for about $250,000. But in June,  Branson's company announced that the price for aspiring astronauts would raise to $ 450,000 per seat. 

Because of the astronomical costs of running a space flight operation, this doesn't cut it. The company has been pouring money into research efforts for other aircraft, like its Delta-class spaceship, CNBC reported.

It could bolster its profits by angling for more research flights, like the Galactic 01 flight launched last quarter in partnership with the Italian government. These flights are more profitable than passenger flights, producing roughly $600,000 in revenue per seat, SpaceNews reported .

"He's been very patient with trying to see this company through to success. I would say the time is coming where they really do need to deliver on that," Caleb Henry, director of research at space advisory firm Quilty Analytics, told Fortune . 

Launch weather report: Galactic 02 should have clear skies — for now

Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity is likely to launch into clear skies that will soon darken. 

The National Weather Service forecasts clear weather up to about 2 p.m. local time around the launch site in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

The flight is due to take off soon after 9 a.m. local time.

After the clear weather fades, scattered thunderstorms and rain are predicted, with wind gusts that could go up to 20 miles per hour. 

The flight should be done by then, though.

What will the launch itself look like? Not your typical rocket scene.

Though the VSS Unity is a spacecraft, it won't be blasting from a launchpad like a SpaceX or Blue Origin rocket when takeoff rolls around at 11 a.m. ET.

Instead, the ship is attached to a " mothership ," a carrier aircraft that is a lot like a normal plane. 

The aircraft carries VSS Unity to 50,000 feet altitude, where the spaceship separates.

That's when the spacecraft blasts its rocket engine, reaching up to Mach 3 to go up about 300,000 feet in the air. 

See inside the ship that will take Virgin Galactic passengers to the edge of space

Passengers will be riding the VSS Unity . The picture above shows the inside of the ship.

At the top of the cabin are the pilot's controls, followed by a few rows on passenger seats.

At the peak of the ship's ascent, passengers can look through the cabin's round windows to see the curvature of the Earth before removing their seat belts to float around the cabin, just as microgravity kicks in when the ship turns around.

There's a little space at the back for scientific equipment when the craft is used for research, but that's it.

You can see the inside of the ship here:

Because the trip is very short — about 90 minutes — the ship has very few amenities, not even bathrooms, passenger Jon Goodwin previously said.

"One thing the rocket ship doesn't have is a toilet, so we will be wearing nappies, which takes me back a bit," the 80-year-old Olympian told Sky News.

Mom who is bringing her daughter into space says she's not fazed by the OceanGate disaster

Keisha Schahaff will be bringing her 18-year-old daughter with her on Virgin Galactic's flight.

Asked about the recent OceanGate Expeditions submersible trip to the Titanic, Schahaff told DailyMail.com this had not made her nervous about the trip and that she is "completely elated" about the upcoming flight.

The doomed OceanGate expedition killed five, including a father-and-son duo: Suleman Dawood and his 19-year-old son Shahzada.

The deaths raised concern about the safety of extreme tourism  in general — though Virgin Galactic vigorously rejected the comparison.

CEO Michael Colglazier said in June that Virgin's focus on safety made the comparison unfair — noting that the company has been regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration since 2016.

"Virgin Galactic ships are built, they're designed, they're maintained in a way that leverages decades of experience in the aerospace industry," Colglazier said — drawing a contrast with OceanGate, which was unregulated and notably cavalier about safety.

Recap: Virgin Galactic's passengers are set to fly more than 50 miles above the ground but not enter Earth's orbit.

This is a suborbital flight , meaning it will not enter Earth's orbit.

Virgin Galactic's space plane , called the VSS Unity, is not powerful enough for that.

Instead, if all goes according to plan, a double-fuselage aircraft called "VMS Eve" will serve as a mothership and carry the spacecraft roughly 10 miles above sea level. Then it will drop the VSS Unity.

The pilots must then fire the rocket plane's engines, tilt its nose toward the heavens, and roar upwards another 45 miles or so.

Near the peak of the flight, more than 50 miles above the ground, the plane will glide.

With the curvature of the Earth stretching below and the blackness of space looming above, the passengers will be able to unbuckle, float weightlessly around the cabin, and gawk out the plane's 17 windows. That will last about five minutes until the plane begins to fall back to Earth.

The passengers will not fly above the Kármán line , which is sometimes considered the threshold of space at 62 miles above sea level. But the Federal Aviation Administration has previously recognized VSS Unity pilots as astronauts.

When is the Virgin Galactic flight today?

Virgin Galactic will be live-streaming the flight Thursday, starting with a countdown just before the release of the spaceship VSS unity from its mothership.

Tune in to the live stream here at 11 a.m. ET, which will be 9 a.m. at the launch site in the New Mexico desert:

At least 800 people are waiting in line for their seat on Virgin Galactic's flight — including Elon Musk

At least 800 people are waiting in line for their seat on the Virgin Galactic flight. 

Customers waiting for their turn reportedly include Elon Musk , who paid a $10,000 deposit for the ticket, Richard Branson said in 2021. 

Virgin Galactic started selling advanced tickets for the flight in the early 2000s. Though some early tickets were sold for around $200,000 to $250,000, they are now being sold for $450,000 , with an initial deposit of $150,000. 

These aren't the most expensive ticket prices on the flight — research and astronaut training seats can fetch up to $600,000, Space.com reported in 2021.

Galactic 02 kicks off a new era of space tourism for Virgin Galactic.

This is  Virgin Galactic's second commercial flight , but it's the first to carry paying customers. In June, Galactic 01 carried a three-person crew from the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council of Italy.

Before that, the company's space plane had only flown employees and its billionaire founder, Richard Branson .

Virgin Galactic plans to fly paying customers to the edge of space every month.

The passengers are 80-year-old British Olympian Jon Goodwin and mother-daughter duo Keisha Schahaff and Anastatia Mayers.

Goodwin competed in canoeing in the 1972 Munich games. He is set to be the first Olympian to travel to the edge of space, and the second person with Parkinson's disease.

Goodwin bought his ticket 18 years ago for $250,000, making him the fourth person to snatch a commercial seat on a Virgin Galactic flight, he told Sky News . He added that he "certainly did" worry it would never happen.

Schahaff is a health and wellness coach. She won two tickets in a raffle to raise funds for the nonprofit Space for Humanity. She's bringing her 18-year-old daughter, Mayers, who is a philosophy and physics student at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

They will be the first people from Antigua and Barbuda to take a spaceflight, according to Virgin Galactic.

The trio participated in a five-day readiness program in New Mexico, designed to prepare them "physically, mentally and spiritually" for the trip, according to the company. 

Beth Moses , Chief Astronaut Instructor for Virgin Galactic, is set to join the passengers in the cabin of the VSS Unity for the flight. The company's pilots CJ Sturckow and Kelly Latimer are slated to fly the space plane.

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Watch CBS News

Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic complete successful space flight

By William Harwood

July 12, 2021 / 7:09 AM EDT / CBS News

Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson rocketed into space Sunday, an edge-of-the-seat sub-orbital test flight intended to demonstrate his company's air-launched spaceplane is ready for passengers who can afford the ultimate thrill ride.

And it appeared to do just that, zooming to an altitude just above 50 miles and giving Branson and his five crewmates about three minutes of weightlessness and spectacular views of Earth before plunging back into the atmosphere for a spiraling descent to touchdown at Virgin's New Mexico launch site.

"I have dreamt of this moment since I was a kid but honestly, nothing could prepare you for the view of Earth from space," Branson, 70, said after landing, at a rare loss for words. "It was just magical. ... I'm just taking it all in, it's unreal."

The flight effectively upstaged Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who  plans a sub-orbital spaceflight of his own aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft on July 20 as the two companies compete for passengers in the emerging commercial space marketplace.

Bezos complimented Branson and his team after landing, posting a note to Instagram saying "congratulations on the flight. Can't wait to join the club!"

Branson's trip began in dramatic fashion as Virgin's twin-fuselage carrier jet — with the VSS Unity rocket-powered spaceplane bolted under its wing — lifted away from the company's Spaceport America launch site near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, at 8:40 a.m. local time (10:40 a.m. EDT).

Joining the globe-trotting billionaire aboard Unity were pilots David Mackay and Michael Masucci, along with Virgin astronaut trainer Beth Moses, flight engineer Colin Bennett and Sirisha Bandla, the company's vice president of government relations.

With a throng of reporters and a global audience following along on YouTube and across Virgin's social media channels, the Virgin mothership VMS Eve slowly climbed to an altitude of about 45,000 feet and then, after a final round of safety checks, released Unity high above the New Mexico desert.

Seconds later, Mackay and Masucci, both veterans of earlier test flights to space, ignited Unity's hybrid rocket motor, slamming the crew back in their seats as the spacecraft shot forward and pitched up onto a near-vertical trajectory.

Burning rubberized solid propellant with liquid nitrous oxide, Unity's hybrid motor fired for about one minute, accelerating the craft to about three times the speed of sound before shutting down.

The spaceplane continued zooming upward along a ballistic trajectory, giving Branson and company a chance to briefly unstrap, float about the cabin and marvel at the spectacular view as Unity reached its maximum altitude of 53.5 miles — three-and-a-half miles above what NASA and the FAA consider the "boundary" of space.

Live video from inside the spacecraft showed Branson and his crewmates floating free of their seats and enjoying the sensation of weightlessness, not to mention the out-of-this-world view.

"To all you kids down there, I was once a child with a dream looking up to the stars," Branson said while his cremates cavorted in microgravity. "Now I'm an adult, in a spaceship with lots of other wonderful adults, looking down to our beautiful, beautiful Earth.

"To the next generation of dreamers: If we can do this, just imagine what you can do!" he said, before floating out of his seat. 

A few moments later, the spacecraft then began the long plunge back to Earth.

Using an innovation pioneered by aircraft designer Burt Rutan, Unity's wing and tail fins are designed to pivot upward 60 degrees once out of the atmosphere, giving the spaceplane the aerodynamics of a badminton shuttlecock, ensuring a belly-down re-entry.

Mackay and Masucci rotated the wing upward shortly after the rocket motor shut down and left it in the "feathered" orientation until it descended to around 55,000 feet when it was pivoted back parallel to the fuselage, turning Unity into a glider.

From there, the pilots guided the spaceplane through a spiraling descent, lined up on Spaceport America's 12,000-foot-long runway and settled to a picture-perfect landing, closing out a flight that lasted 59 minutes from takeoff to touchdown.

Mike Moses, Virgin president for space flight and safety, said an initial look at the data showed Unity came through its latest mission in great shape.

"We've looked at the data, we've done our quick engineering walk around (and) the ship looks pristine, no issues whatsoever," he said. "We'll take our time, do all the detailed inspections, and then we'll figure out when we're ready to go again. But ship looked perfect."

NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Space Force agree that space effectively begins at an altitude of 50 miles where the atmosphere is so thin that wings, rudders and other aerodynamic surfaces no longer have any effect.

As a result, Branson, Bennett and Bandla are now considered full-fledged Virgin astronauts, a distinction granted to Mackay, Masucci and Moses after earlier test flights.

Sunday's launching marked Unity's 22nd test flight, its fourth trip to space, Virgin's first with a six-person crew on board and the first for Branson, who beat Bezos into space by nine days.

Virgin Galactic and Bezos' Blue Origin both plan to launch passengers on flights to the edge of space and back and both are in the final stages of test flights before beginning commercial operations.

Branson effectively blindsided Bezos, scheduling Sunday's flight just ahead of the Amazon founder's, which had already been announced . But Branson insisted again Sunday that he doesn't view the competition as a "race" for space.

"I've said this so many times, it really wasn't a race," Branson said. "We're just delighted that everything went so fantastically well. We wish Jeff the absolute best and the people who are going up with him during his flight."

Virgin plans two more test flights, but company officials hope to begin launching paying customers, at $250,000 or more per seat, in early 2022. Flush with success Sunday, Branson announced a charity sweepstakes benefitting Space for Humanity, saying two winners will be selected to join one of the initial commercial flights.

• Virgin Galactic
• Richard Branson

Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News.

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Virgin Australia Launches White-Label Platform Launch

Rocket Travel by Agoda partnered with Virgin Australia to launch an online booking platform that offers hotel accommodations and car rental options to its customers. Through the platform, customers will also be able to earn and redeem Velocity Frequent Flyer Points with every hotel and car booking.

Goals & approach: The Rocket Travel by Agoda difference

Virgin Australia was looking for a partner who could supply a streamlined ancillary travel product to help supplement flight sales. They wanted a travel hub that would feature hotels, cars as well as other travel experiences and activities. They also wanted the ability for members to earn and redeem Velocity Frequent Flyer Points.

The team at Rocket Travel by Agoda has extensive industry knowledge and experience producing partner-branded travel platforms with an emphasis on rewards. Our ability to deliver on each one of Virgin Australia’s touchpoints made Rocket a perfect fit to align with their strategic initiatives in reaching current customers as well as drawing in new customers.

Final result: Partner-branded travel platform

Rocket Travel by Agoda collaborated with Virgin Australia to craft a partner-branded travel platform that leverages an extensive inventory of hotels and cars, connecting customers with real-time discounts. Additionally, customers will be able to earn and redeem Velocity Frequent Flyer Points with every hotel and car booking.

Virgin Australia Group Chief Commercial Officer, Dave Emerson said the airline is providing hundreds of thousands of great value travel options for customers through a new simple booking process provided by Rocket Travel by Agoda.

“Virgin Australia is committed to always providing the best value and experience to our customers at every step of the travel journey and the relaunch of a hotels and car rental deals platform is a great example of that,” said Mr. Emerson.

“We are also providing even more travel options for our more than 10.8 million Velocity Frequent Flyer members who now have more ways to earn and redeem Points which we know is a great benefit to many Australians who are looking for more cost-effective ways to travel amid rising inflation.

“Our partnership with Rocket Travel by Agoda provides a competitive proposition for Australian travellers and heralds another significant customer improvement as we continue on our very bright future,” he said.

The platform can be accessed through   virginaustralia.com/au/en/#/ by selecting the Hotels and Car Hire options.

Customers can also access the booking engines directly through virginaustralia.com/au/hotels or virginaustralia.com/au/car-hire . There, they can toggle between Earn Velocity Points and Redeem Velocity Points which will give the user a different search experience.

Why partner with Rocket Travel by Agoda?

“This new travel loyalty platform is the result of countless hours of collaboration and partnership between Virgin Australia and Rocket Travel by Agoda,” said Sarah Moore, leader of Rocket Travel. “We are excited to share the new platform with Virgin Australia’s customer base, and connect them to the best value and unparalleled customer service.”

As part of Rocket Travel by Agoda’s commitment to our partners, like Virgin Australia, and their customers, we will continue to analyze the evolution of the travel industry and customer behaviors. Our goal is to deliver industry-leading travel options with the customer experience in mind.

About the author

Rocket Travel by Agoda, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is a leader in the travel industry offering technology and marketing solutions for some of the largest consumer brands in the world.

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Virgin Galactic completes first commercial rocket plane flight to space

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Delta rockets retired with launch of US reconnaissance satellite

The U.S. Space Force and a Boeing-Lockheed joint venture sent a secret reconnaissance payload to orbit on Tuesday atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket, the last flight of a workhorse launch vehicle brand that has logged nearly 400 missions dating back to 1960.

A first-of-its-kind flight. A one-of-a-kind experience.

Our unique and innovative Spaceflight System enables you and your fellow astronauts to enjoy the most thrilling and awe-inspiring journey of your life, in unparalleled comfort and ease.

VMS Eve is a custom-built, four-engine, dual-fuselage jet carrier aircraft with a unique high-altitude, heavy-payload capability. It is also the world’s largest all-carbon aviation vehicle in service.

Our hybrid propulsion system combines the inherent stability of a solid rocket motor and the controllability of a liquid rocket motor. It is simpler and safer by design.

Your individually size-adjusted seat has been built to enhance your comfort and experience during each stage of flight.

A minute of high-octane, high-g euphoria is followed by absolute silence, absolute space.

17 windows — more than any other commercial spacecraft in history – with built-in hand grabs to optimize zero-g viewing.

Astronauts frequently report a cognitive shift in awareness and perspective brought about by viewing the Earth from space. This has become known as the Overview Effect.

While in space, astronauts are free to leave their seats for the effortless freedom of zero gravity.

Virgin Galactic currently offsets emissions for each spaceflight, and we are always working towards innovations that make our flights and daily operations more sustainable.

Our engineering teams are hard at work to quickly bring more spaceships online and facilitate your spaceflight.

Our pilots go above and beyond.

As the spaceline for Earth, we’re pleased to offer you an elegant, spaceflight system designed for safety, reusability and customer experience. You’ll be in the expert hands of our highly experienced pilots, all with long flight careers behind them.

World-class safety.

At Virgin Galactic, safety has always been our North Star and an ethos that’s deeply embedded into our culture, evidenced by an exhaustive test flight program and highly experienced operational teams drawn from the world of aerospace and aviation.

The Virgin Galactic spaceflight system has been specifically designed to reduce and make risk more manageable, throughout the entire flight.

Vital to this is an air-launched, winged and piloted spaceship with a fully controllable propulsion system, enabling us to cut a flight short, safely and comfortably at any stage.

“Feeling the power of the motor behind me, and seeing the sky change from blue to black ahead – it was an experience unlike any I’ve ever had. While the speed and force was exhilarating, I felt safe and comfortable at all times.”

Sirisha Bandla -

Virgin Galactic Astronaut 004