Virgin Galactic first tourist trip into space takes off
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The three passengers, Jon Goodwin and Keisha Schahaff and her adolescent daughter Anastasia Mayers, floated through the Virgin spaceship around 45 minutes after takeoff.
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Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity departs Mojave Air & Space Port in Mojave, California, on February 13, 2020. (AP)
Virgin Galactic sent its first tourist passengers into space on Thursday, after a nearly two-decade commercial quest according to the company.
The mission, Galactic 02, is the second commercial flight by the company.
The three passengers, Jon Goodwin and Keisha Schahaff and her adolescent daughter Anastasia Mayers, floated through the Virgin spaceship around 45 minutes after takeoff.
Virgin Galactic announcer Sirisha Bandla congratulated them for "officially" becoming astronauts when the spaceship pushed over 80 kilometers (50 miles) in altitude, the threshold indicating the edge of space where gravity's influence is limited.
Live footage showed the three appreciating the Earth below.
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Virgin Galactic's spaceflights include a massive, twin-fuselage carrier aircraft that takes off from a runway, reaches altitude, and then lowers a rocket-powered spaceplane into space.
After spending some minutes in space, the aircraft descended successfully and landed in New Mexico on the same runway.
Goodwin, 80, an explorer who competed for Britain as a canoeist in the 1972 Olympics, became Virgin Galactic's first paid space traveler after winning their tickets in a charity lottery.
Schahaff, a health coach, and her daughter Mayers, a philosophy and physics major at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, also won their tickets in a competition.
Thursday's long-awaited flight was the culmination of a nearly two-decade-old promise by British billionaire Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic's founder, to bring tourists into space, offering them the opportunity to experience weightlessness and observe the Earth.
Virgin Galactic launched its first commercial plane into space on June 29 with a crew of six astronauts. Richard Branson's space company, together with Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, has now joined a select club of enterprises that can take paying customers to space. The mission, dubbed Galactic 01, carried two members of the Italian Air Force and a research engineer rather than space tourists.
Billionaires race to space!
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) July 14, 2021
Here are the differences between #RichardBranson's Virgin Galactic and #JeffBezos' Blue Origin space vehicles. pic.twitter.com/Cs13laUiX8
In the "suborbital" space tourism market, Virgin Galactic competes with billionaire Jeff Bezos' business Blue Origin, which has previously carried 31 people into space using a vertical lift-off rocket. The rocket was suspended, however, following an unmanned flying disaster in September 2022.
