Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, 70, became the first billionaire astronaut, beating fellow space tourism enthusiast Jeff Bezos by just nine days.
The launch of the rocket spaceplane VSS Unity with Branson on board took place at 17:42 Moscow time on July 11, 2021. The launch site is Spaceport America, built by Branson in the desert of New Mexico for almost $250 million. The spaceplane also arrived here after almost an hour and a half of suborbital flight. The spaceplane was launched from the runway aboard the VMS Eve carrier ship, which brought it to an estimated altitude of 15 km, after which VSS Unity independently continued flying to the upper boundary of the mesosphere (80-90 km above the Earth).
According to CNET correspondent Eric Mack, the launch was originally scheduled for 7:00 local time (16:00 Moscow time), but at the last moment was postponed by an hour and a half due to weather conditions.
Thus, Branson became the first billionaire to travel into space. For VSS Unity, this is the first flight with a full crew of two pilots and four astronauts, including Branson. The tests of the spaceplane were successfully completed less than two months ago, on May 22, 2021.
That Branson himself would take part in the inaugural spaceplane flight was announced at the end of 2020, but the exact date appeared in early July, nine days ahead of the date that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will fly into space on his company’s Blue Origin rocket. . After that, the press started talking about the “battle of the billionaires for space,” but Branson himself denied the connection between the choice of the date and the competition with Bezos. For its part, Blue Origin refused to recognize Branson’s flight as a space flight, since it will take place at an altitude of less than 100 km above the earth, beyond which outer space begins.
Richard Branson is a 70-year-old British-born billionaire and founder of the Virgin Group. Starting in the recording market in the 1970s, the company has grown into a diversified holding company with assets in transportation and telecommunications. Branson’s net worth on the day of his space flight is $5,9 billion.
Virgin Galactic is the world’s first public space travel company. It was founded in 2004 and plans to carry out tourist suborbital flights on spacecraft, which it orders from aircraft manufacturers from Scaled Composites. The market value of the company reaches almost $12 billion, 24% of the company belongs to the parent Virgin Group.