New Shepard will reach a height of 65 miles, higher than Branson and above the Karman Line, which is seen as the boundary of space by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, an international standard-setting body for aeronautics and astronautics. When it reaches its highest arc, the capsule on the rocket will detach, giving passengers four minutes of weightlessness. Blue Origin, Bezos’s space company, will be launching a booster rocket named New Shepard. While Branson will be flying on a spaceplane, Bezos will be taking a rocket to space. How does this flight compare with Jeff Bezos’s planned flight? However, Branson and his team will only be weightless in space for four to five minutes before the craft tilts and returns to Earth. The trip will last in total about two and a half hours. How long will the space plane be up there? But there is some dispute over where outer space begins. VSS Unity will reach 55 miles above sea level, which the United States air force and Nasa consider is past the boundary of outer space. At 10 miles above sea level, the wings will rotate back in place and glide to a runway landing. The plane then will plunge back to the Earth. The VSS Unity will then rotate its wings and tail booms upwards. They will stay in this weightless state for a few minutes before the gravity of Earth begins to pull them down. The passengers will be able to see the Earth below through the plane’s windows. There the spacecraft will drift in space as the pilots shut off the engine. The space plane will then immediately fire its rocket engines, tilt upwards and accelerate to three times the speed of sound to reach the edge of space.

The mothership will carry and then drop VSS Unity at about 10 miles above sea level. The VSS Unity will take off from Virgin Galactic’s facilities on a mothership plane called VMS Eve. He will fly with two pilots, Dave MacKay and Michael Masucci, and three other passengers, Virgin’s chief astronaut instructor, Beth Moses, operations engineer, Colin Bennett, and Sirisha Bandla, Virgin’s vice-president for government affairs and research operations. He will fly to space for an up-and-down test flight on VSS Unity, Virgin Galactic’s sub-orbital rocket-powered space plane. Virgin Atlantic will stream the flight on YouTube, starting at 9am ET. VSS Unity will take flight from Virgin Atlantic’s base at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Like a Virgin by Richard Branson