Is Sir Richard Branson Beating Jeff Bezos as First Billionaire in Space?
Ghana
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UK businessman Sir Richard Branson is on his way to fulfilling a lifetime's ambition: flying to the edge of space.
His Virgin Galactic rocket plane has taken off for a 1.5-hour mission which will see it reach an altitude where the sky turns black and the Earth's horizon curves away into the distance.
The entrepreneur says he wants to evaluate the experience before allowing paying customers aboard next year.
The mission above New Mexico began shortly after 08:30 EST (12:30 GMT).
“I've wanted to go to space since I was a kid, and I want to enable hopefully hundreds of thousands of other people over the next 100 years to be able to go to space," Sir Richard said.
"And why shouldn't they go to space? Space is extraordinary; the Universe is magnificent. I want people to be able to look back at our beautiful Earth and come home and work very hard to try to do magic to it to look after it."
It's been a long road for Sir Richard to get to this point. He first announced his intention to make a space plane in 2004, with the expectation he'd have a commercial service available by 2007.
Sir Richard says he has spoken to Jeff Bezos on the phone and they have wished each other well in their space endeavours. But there is no doubting there is some edge in the relationship.
Mr Bezos was the first to announce his mission, only to see Sir Richard then move up his own published schedule so he could win first-flight bragging rights.
On Friday, Mr Bezos's Blue Origin space company issued a tweet that took a pop at Virgin Galactic's Unity vehicle. The posting repeated a claim that anyone who flew on the rocket plane would forever have an asterisk by their name because they wouldn't reach the "internationally recognised" altitude for where space begins
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