The British entrepreneur Richard Branson took off into space with his own spaceship – ahead of his billionaire colleague Jeff Bezos by nine days. Branson picked up on Sunday in the VSS Unity with five other astronauts in tow of a carrier aircraft from the commercial spaceport Spaceport America in the US state of New Mexico. The mother aircraft is then supposed to drop the spaceship at a height of around 15 kilometers. The spaceship will then accelerate to more than three times the speed of sound on its own and should reach a height of over 80 kilometers before heading back towards earth after a few minutes. The flight should take a total of 90 minutes.
70-year-old Branson, who has made a fortune in the music and aviation industries with his conglomerate Virgin Group, announced this personal test flight in early July. This was preceded by several manned and unmanned test flights by his company. In 2014, a pilot was killed in a crash.
The goal of Branson, but also of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla boss Elon Musk, is to enter the space tourism business. Branson operates the space company Virgin Galactic. It competes with Bezos’ Blue Origin and Musk’s SpaceX. Bezos plans to fly his rocket more than 100 kilometers high on July 20.
Industry experts at the major Swiss bank UBS expect a market of three billion dollars a year to develop by the end of the decade. Wealthy people from all over the world have already placed themselves on the suppliers’ waiting lists in order to get hold of flight tickets at a price of around 250,000 dollars each.