[imagesource: Virgin Galactic / Handout via Reuters]

Richard Branson, the world’s 589th richest person, soared into space yesterday (July 11).

This makes Branson the first person to enter space in one’s own vessel, and the second oldest, according to The Daily Mail, to go into space at the age of 70.

This feat was accomplished nine days before Jeff Bezos planned to take his own rocket ship, the New Shepard, into space.

Although the two billionaires refuse to openly acknowledge any competition, the timing, as well as some comments on Twitter, prove otherwise.

Bezos congratulated Branson for the successful flight, writing: “Can’t wait to join the club!”.

Meanwhile, his space company, Blue Origin, had made a more revealing comment before that. Reuters reports:

“New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name,” Blue Origin said in a series of Twitter posts on Friday.

This comment is because Branson’s Virgin Galactic rocket plane only flew 50 miles (80 kilometres) above the New Mexico desert, just a little bit off from making it “a true spaceflight experience”:

Blue Origin, however, has disparaged Virgin Galactic as falling short of a true spaceflight experience, saying that unlike Unity, Bezos’s New Shepard tops the 62-mile-high-mark (100 km), called the Kármán line, set by an international aeronautics body as defining the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space.

Although, NASA believes that anything over 50 miles is enough.

So, where was the third player in all this?

Elon Musk was apparently very present, alongside various other space industry executives, future customers, and other well-wishers who had gathered to witness the launch.

Musk’s SpaceX initiative plans to send its first all-civilian crew (without Musk) into orbit in September.

More about Branson, then.

Branson, along with his crew of five experienced just a few minutes of microgravity before returning to Earth, and the entire flight lasted only an hour.

But it was enough to grant Branson and his crew official wing pins from the Federal Aviation Administration, which they will get soon.

The short trip was also the “dawn of a new space age” where after a few more test flights, Virgin Galactic will open up regular commercial operations in 2022.

For a chance to experience the exhilaration of supersonic flight, weightlessness, and the spectacle of spaceflight, a customer will have to fork out around $250 000 (roughly R3,5 million) for a ticket to get on board.

Of course, 600 hundred wealthy would-be citizen astronauts have already booked reservations, with Elon Musk reportedly one of them.

Branson does aim to lower the price to $40 000 (R570 000) per seat later on, but proving rocket travel is safe for the public comes first.

The event was live-streamed (15 hours ago) in a presentation hosted by late-night television comedian Stephen Colbert:

Here’s a more condensed video of the launch:

Speaking from the Virgin Galactic rocket plane, Branson was stoked:

I just hope that seeing Earth from that vantage point will make these billionaires focus on trying to save the planet from the climate change crisis next.

[sources:reueters&thedailymail]