In the United States, the VSS Unity rocket plane was launched with the 70-year-old British billionaire and Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson on board. The ship went to the border with space. The event is broadcast on the official Virgin Galactic website .
The launch was made from the runway of the first private US spaceport Spaceport America, located in the state of New Mexico.
Initially, the launch was supposed to take place earlier: Virgin Galactic postponed the first suborbital test flight of its rocket plane for an hour and a half due to unsatisfactory weather conditions.
The crew, in addition to the billionaire himself, included three Virgin Galactic astronauts – former NASA employee Beth Moses, 33-year-old Indian-born Syrysh Bundla and engineer Colin Bennett.
Earlier it became known that the founder of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk visited Branson before the flight .
Prior to that, Blue Origin, whose founder and richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, will go into space on July 20, said that Branson‘s planned flight on July 11 would not be a full-fledged space flight, as it would pass below the Karman line – the generally recognized height of 100 km, with where the cosmos begins.