Richard Branson is about to send himself to space on board a Virgin Galactic space plane.
He will become the first of the billionaires who are building space tourism companies to take a flight in his own craft, beating Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. But the latter will not have to wait long – he is due to go to space himself on 20 July, atop one of his own Blue Origin spacecraft.
Mr Branson will leave from Virgin Galactic’s “Spaceport America” in the desert of New Mexico on Sunday morning. The full flight is expected to take about an hour, with a few minutes of weightlessness as the craft reaches its highest point.
Whether that really counts as going to space or just touching the edge of it is a matter of hot debate. Mr Branson will not cross the Kármán line – the widely accepted boundary where space is said to begin – something that Mr Bezos’s Blue Origin has pointed out publicly.
Follow all the latest on Mr Branson’s journey here.
