Richard Branson was hungover on the day the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon in 1969. He had turned 19 two days earlier and had celebrated acco

The Joyride Era of Space Travel Is Here

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2021-07-11 20:00:07

Richard Branson was hungover on the day the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon in 1969. He had turned 19 two days earlier and had celebrated accordingly. But he was “gripped” as he watched Neil Armstrong on his family’s little black-and-white television, he later wrote in a memoir. He knew then—he was “instantly convinced”—that someday he would go to space himself.

The adventurous British billionaire did it today, at the age of 70, with his own space company, Virgin Galactic, from his own spaceport in New Mexico. He didn’t go as far as the moon, nor did he orbit Earth, but for a few minutes, Branson hovered over an invisible boundary between the planet’s atmosphere and outer space, basking in the sensation of weightlessness.

Branson, along with two pilots and three Virgin Galactic employees, flew on the company’s rocket-powered spaceplane. The design is quite different from the traditional picture of space travel. The trip didn’t involve a rocket lifting up from a launchpad. Instead, a giant airplane carried the winged passenger spaceship high into the sky, to an altitude of about 50,000 feet, and dropped it. The spaceplane then ignited its own engines and hurtled itself higher, just beyond the edge of space. Eventually, the spaceplane glided back down and landed on a runway.