Virgin Galactic's spacecraft takes off from New Mexico

Virgin Galactic, the private space exploration company founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, the chairman of Virgin Group, successfully launched its first-ever space flight with a paying customer on Thursday. This achievement marks the beginning of the commercial space tourism era. In particular, the competition among Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin (founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos), and SpaceX (founded by Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla) is expected to intensify.

According to CNN, Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spacecraft took off from New Mexico on Thursday and reached an altitude of 85 kilometers. It safely returned to Earth at 9:42 a.m., one hour and 12 minutes after launch. At the peak of the flight, passengers experienced a few minutes of weightlessness.

The three paying passengers were members of the Italian Air Force and an engineer from the Italian National Research Council. They conducted experiments, including biomedicine, engineering, and physiology studies. The exact cost of the spaceflight wasn't disclosed, but it is estimated to be between $250,000 and $450,000.

Virgin Galactic stated that the first commercial spaceflight marks the beginning of a new era, providing regular opportunities for private passengers and researchers to reach space, adding that the company hopes to launch its second customer spaceflight in August. Currently, the firm has a backlog of nearly 800 customers eagerly awaiting their chance to travel to space.

However, there are calls for increased safety regulations for extreme tourism, which includes tours of the deep ocean and space, in the wake of the Titan accident where a submersible exploded last month while attempting to see the sunken Titanic in the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in the loss of all lives on board. Space tourism is in a regulatory blind spot as the U.S. Congress has granted a moratorium.


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