British billionaire Richard Branson completed a short space flight on Sunday aboard his own rocket ship.
Take-off took place at 16:30 CET after being delayed by an hour and a half due to weather conditions on site and was broadcast live on the Virgin Galactic website.
Branson and five crewmates from his Virgin Galactic space tourism company reached an altitude of about 88 km over the New Mexico desert — enough to experience 3-4 minutes of weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth — and then safely glided home to a runway landing.
"Seventeen years of hard work to get us this far," Branson said as he congratulated his team on the trip back aboard the sleek white space plane, named Unity.
The London-born founder of the Virgin Group, who turns 71 in a week, wasn't supposed to fly until later this summer. But he assigned himself to an earlier flight after Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos announced plans to ride his own rocket into space from West Texas on July 20.
Virgin Galactic doesn't expect to start flying customers before next year. Blue Origin has yet to open ticket sales or even announce prices, but late last week boasted via Twitter that it would take clients higher and offer bigger windows.
Unlike Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX, which launch capsules atop reusable booster rockets, Virgin Galactic uses a twin-fuselage aircraft to get its rocket ship aloft. The space plane is released from the mothership about 13,400 metres up, then fires its rocket motor to streak straight to space.
The rocket plane's portion of the flight took just 15 minutes, Euronews reported.
