Richard Branson Will Try to Beat Jeff Bezos to Space With July 11 Flight

Seeking to upstage Jeff Bezos as the first rocket company owner to go to space, Richard Branson, the British billionaire who founded a galaxy of Virgin companies, announced on Thursday night that he would be a member of the crew on the next test flight of the Virgin Galactic space plane.

“The team was ready, so they asked Richard if he was ready to go,” said Aleanna Crane, vice president of communications for Virgin Galactic. “It’s a big day. It’s a very exciting day.”

Mr. Branson will be in a position to claim bragging rights in a growing business of spaceflight for private citizens. Companies including Virgin Galactic and Mr. Bezos’s Blue Origin are competing to launch paying passengers on suborbital and orbital trips in the coming years. Although the first trips will be expensive, the expectation is that ticket prices will come down over time as the market grows.

Mr. Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 to provide short space tourist flights to the edge of space, and he has long said he will be a passenger on the first commercial flight. But development of the SpaceShipTwo — a winged rocket that flies to an altitude of more than 50 miles — has taken years longer than Mr. Branson expected. The setbacks included the crash of the first SpaceShipTwo plane, V.S.S. Enterprise, in October 2014 during a test flight, which killed one of the two pilots.

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