Why Richard Branson’s Spaceflight Is a Very Big Deal
July 12, 2021 at 12:43AM Depending on how you look at things, Richard Branson did not accomplish terribly much this morning. Yes, the billionaire co-founder of Virgin Galactic woke up intending to go to space today, and yes, he went. Along with two pilots and three other passengers, Branson lifted off aboard his VSS Unity spacecraft shortly before 9:00 a.m. MT, soared 86 km (53.5 miles) up, arced into space for four minutes of weightlessness and then glided gently back to Earth, landing on a runway in the Mojave Desert. Fine. Noted. But history will recall that the flight occurred more than 60 years after Alan Shepard flew the same popgun trajectory aboard his Freedom 7 Mercury capsule, becoming the first American in space. Even that flight looked small compared to the journey of the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin, who, less than a month earlier, became the first human being in space, flying his Vostok 1 spacecraft through a full orbit around the Earth. So Branson duplicated ...