Tourism rocket ship reaches space on test light

MOJAVE: A Virgin Galactic rocket plane blasted to the edge of space on Thursday and returned safely to the California desert, capping off years of difficult testing to become the first US commercial human flight to reach space since America’s shuttle programme ended in 2011.

The test flight foreshadows a new era of civilian space travel that could kick off as soon as 2019, with British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic battling other billionaire-backed ventures, like Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, to be the first to offer suborbital flights to fare-paying tourists.

Virgin Galactic says its tourism spaceship has climbed more than 80 kilometres high, which the company considers the boundary of space.

Virgin Space Ship Unity was released from a carrier aircraft over California’s Mojave Desert early on Thursday and ignited its rocket engine.

The spacecraft with two test pilots at the controls quickly hurtled upward and out of sight from viewers on the ground.

Mission official Enrico Palermo says it reached an altitude of 82 kilometres before beginning its gliding descent. It landed minutes later. The company plans to eventually take paying passengers on short trips to space.

Virgin’s twin-fuselage carrier airplane holding the Spaceshiptwo passenger spacecraft took off soon after 7am local time from the Mojave Air and Space Port, about 145 km north of Los Angeles.

Branson, wearing a leather bomber jacket with a fur collar, attended the take-off along with hundreds of spectators on a crisp morning in the California desert. After the rocket plane topped 50-mile altitude, reaching an apogee of 51.4 miles above earth, a crying Branson high-fived

and hugged spectators. The plane reentered the atmosphere at 2.5 times the speed of sound and landed a few minutes later.

One of the pilots handed Branson a small Earth stress ball when the two hugged after the space ship landed safely after about an hour’s journey.

“Today we have shown Virgin Galactic can open space to the world,” Branson said, adding he aimed for a commercial SPACE LIGHT with passengers — IncludING HIMSELF — By MARCH 2019.

e curvature of the planet.