Tourism Eyes Final Frontier As Branson Soars Into Space

Swashbuckling entrepreneur Richard Bransonhurtled into space aboard his own winged rocket ship Sunday, beating out fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos.

The nearly 71-year-old Branson and five crewmates from his Virgin Galactic space-tourism company reached an altitude of about 53 miles (88 km) over the New Mexico desert — enough to experience three to four minutes of weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth — and then safely glided to a runway landing. Indian-origin aeronautical engineer Sirisha Bandla, part of the crew, also became the third Indian-American woman to fly into space.

“The whole thing, it was just magical,” a jubilant Branson said after the trip home aboard the gleaming white space plane, named Unity. The brief, up-and-down flight — the rocketship’s portion took only about 15 minutes, or about as long as Alan Shepard’s first US spaceflight in 1961 — was a splashy and unabashedly commercial plug for Virgin Galactic, which plans to start taking paying customers on joyrides next year.