Paul Caine | July 12, 2021 7:06 pm
On Sunday, the winged rocket ship VSS Unity was carried by a mothership to around 50,000 feet before detaching and then blasting to a peak altitude of 57 miles above the Earth’s surface before returning to land. The entire trip took roughly an hour and afforded Branson and his three fellow passengers — employees at Virgin Galactic rather than paying passengers — a view of the curvature of the Earth and several minutes of weightlessness.
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But beyond being the ultimate billionaire’s joyride, how significant was the achievement?
Allen Root, a senior writer at Barron’s who writes about the commercial space industry among other topics, said that while Branson’s accomplishment was impressive, it was not nearly as impressive as Elon Musk’s SpaceX delivering NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in May 2020. That was the first time a crewed NASA mission had launched from the U.S. since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.