A Virgin Galactic spaceship carrying Richard Branson has safely touched down after soaring to the edge of space on Sunday in a voyage the British billionaire called an “experience of a lifetime”.
The VSS Unity vessel reached a peak altitude of around 85km (53 miles), beyond the boundary of space according to the United States, allowing the passengers to experience weightlessness and admire the Earth’s curvature.
“Congratulations to all our wonderful team at Virgin Galactic for 17 years of hard hard work to get us this far,” Branson said during a live feed, as the spaceship glided back to Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Touchdown occurred around 09:40am local time (15:40 GMT), about an hour after take-off.
Sunday’s launch of the VSS Unity passenger rocket plane marked the company’s 22nd test flight of its SpaceShipTwo system and its fourth crewed mission beyond Earth’s atmosphere. It was also the first to carry a full complement of space travellers – two pilots and four “mission specialists”, Branson among them.
A week away from his 71st birthday, Branson and his crewmates walked onto the tarmac waving to a throng of onlookers before boarding the Unity rocket plane parked at the end of a taxiway. A video posted by Virgin Galactic showed Branson arriving earlier at the takeoff site on his bicycle and greeting crewmates with a hug.
It’s a beautiful day to go to space. We’ve arrived at @Spaceport_NM. Get ready to watch LIVE at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST https://t.co/PcvGTmA661 #Unity22 pic.twitter.com/4KjGPpjz0M
— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021
Space analyst Leo Enright told Al Jazeera the flight “could not have gone any smoother” and would give “an enormous boost of public confidence” to Branson’s space enterprise.
An earlier prototype of the Virgin Galactic rocket plane crashed during a test flight over California’s Mojave Desert in 2014, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another.
“The next big thing maybe is an announcement that they are opening up yet again tickets sales for his spaceplane,” Enright said.
They closed them down after the tragic loss of a vehicle and the death of a crew member back in 2014, so there is every possibility that later today Branson will announce that his opening it up again and it’ll be interesting to see how many tickets he is willing to sell.”
A festive gathering of space industry executives, future customers and other well-wishers were on hand to witness Sunday’s launch, which was live-streamed in a presentation hosted by late-night television comedian Stephen Colbert.
Among those present was fellow billionaire and space industry pioneer Elon Musk, who also is the founder of electric carmaker Tesla Inc.
The gleaming white spaceplane was carried aloft attached to the underside of the dual-fuselage jet VMS Eve (named for Branson’s late mother) in a takeoff from Spaceport America, a state-owned facility near the aptly named town of Truth or Consequences. Virgin Galactic leases a large section of the 18,000-acre site.
Reaching its high-altitude launch point at about 46,000 feet, Unity was released from the mothership and fell away as its crew ignited the vehicle’s rocket, sending it streaking straight upward at supersonic speed to the blackness of space some 53 miles (85.9 km) high.
At the apex of the climb with the rocket shut down, the crew then experienced a few minutes of microgravity, before the spaceplane shifted into re-entry mode, and began a gliding descent to a runway back at the spaceport. The entire flight, from takeoff to landing, lasted about an hour.
“This is the highlight of the ride to get a view of the curving Earth and to spend a few minutes in weightlessness, get out of your seats, and do a role which apparently they [did] so this is a big moment,” Alan Boyle, contributing editor at GeekWire, told Al Jazeera.
“It’s pretty thrilling and the view is fantastic, you can see … the slight curve of the Earth and the black sky of space above, and that’s what people are going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to see, and then they have to quickly get back onto their seats.. and experience a few Gs of acceleration on the way down,” Boyle added.
Virgin has said it plans at least two further test flights of the spaceplane in the months ahead before beginning regular commercial operation in 2022.
This is no discount travel service. But demand is apparently strong, with several hundred wealthy would-be citizen astronauts already having booked reservations, priced at around $250,000 per ticket.
The Swiss-based investment bank UBS has estimated the potential value of the space tourism market reaching $3bn annually by 2030.
Proving rocket travel safe for the public is key, given the inherent dangers of spacefligh
