Virgin Galactic launches first tourism mission after decades of promises | CNN

Virgin Galactic — the space tourism company founded by British billionaire Richard Branson — finally launched its first space tourists to the edge of the cosmos, a major step toward delivering on decades of promises. The company’s rocket-powered space plane, VSS Unity, took off at 8:30 a.m. MT from a New Mexico spaceport attached to a massive twin-fuselage mothership.

They were among the first from the Caribbean islands to travel to space; a Jamaican American and Virgin Galactic employee flew on a test mission in May. “When I was two years old, just looking up to the skies, I thought, ‘How can I get there?’ But, being from the Caribbean, I didn’t see how something like this would be possible,” Schahaff said in a news release last month. “The fact that I am here, the first to travel to space from Antigua, shows that space really is becoming more accessible.

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Virgin Galactic’s First Space Tourism Flight Set to LaunchVirgin Galactic's Galactic-02 mission, the first to carry paying civilian customers to space, is scheduled to launch from New Mexico on August 10th. The passengers include a mother-daughter pair from Antigua and Barbuda who won their seats in a charity raffle, and a former Olympic canoeist from the UK who purchased his ticket in 2005.
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