Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson officially on his way to space – CNET [CNET]

Richard Branson has officially embarked on his latest and arguably greatest adventure, but ironically Sunday’s brief flight to the edge of space aboard his Virgin Galactic spaceplane may be the shortest in duration of the British billionaire’s many exploits that include long-distance hot air balloon and trans-Atlantic sailing voyages.

SpaceShipTwo Unity took off from New Mexico’s Spaceport America at 8:40 a.m. MT (7:40 a.m. PT) attached to the underside of the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft VMS Eve. Once the tandem reaches about 45,000 feet (13.7 kilometers), about 50 minutes after takeoff, Unity will detach from Eve and fire its rocket engine to boost itself up to the edge of space.

VMS Eve is named for Branson’s mother Eve, who died due to COVID-19 complications in January.

“She held on for one last victory, managing to fight off the virus, but had expended all of her energy in the process,” Branson wrote in a blog post citing her as a major inspiration and force behind his career. “She took glider lessons disguised as a boy, enlisted in the WRENS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) during World War II … she was inventive, fearless, relentless — an entrepreneur before the word existed.”

After a few minutes of engine burn, Unity should reach an altitude of about 56 miles (90 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth. Some will quibble that this is lower than the commonly accepted definition of space, which begins at a nice, even 100 kilometers (62 miles). However, the US military and NASA set the dividing line at 50 miles up (80 kilometers), so it’s all clearly a little subjective. And for the purposes of space tourism, you get to experience weightlessness and look down on our home planet set against the black void of space from either altitude.

Before taking off, Branson said he would be “looking back at our beautiful Earth and taking it all in and realizing that only 500 other people (actually it’s 570 as of Saturday) have done this.”

Also on the flight is Virgin’s chief astronaut instructor Beth Moses, the only person to have previously ridden in SpaceShipTwo’s passenger cabin, in 2019. The company’s lead operations engineer Colin Bennett is on board, as is Sirisha Bandla, vice president for government affairs. Bandla will be tending a research experiment from the University of Florida involving plant biology’s adaptation to microgravity.

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“The VG flights offer, for the first time, the ability to actively monitor experiments during launch and the initial entry into space. This ability to study biology that experiences launch and then microgravity is, perhaps surprisingly, a radical new development,” said Rob Ferl, principal investigator for the experiment and a professor of horticultural sciences, in a statement. “Previously all experiments had to wait until the spaceship was in orbit before the experiment could be monitored.”

The two Virgin Galactic pilots at the controls of Unity are Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, with former NASA astronaut CJ Sturckow and former NASA research pilot Kelly Latimer flying VMS Eve.

After a brief cruise in microgravity, Unity will return for a landing back at Spaceport America. Branson has promised to “announce something very exciting to give more people a chance to become astronauts.”

You can follow along on the livestream here and on Twitter and Instagram.

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