Billionaire Sir Richard Branson successfully reached the edge of space on board his Virgin Galactic rocket plane.
The UK entrepreneur flew high above New Mexico in the US in the vehicle that his company has been developing for 17 years.
The trip was, he said, the “experience of a lifetime”.
He has now returned safely to earth with his crew.
It makes him the first of the space tourism pioneers to reach space, beating Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
We await official confirmation of the height reached by Sir Richard, but it appears to have been 85km (282,000ft; 53 miles).
He was accompanied on the mission by Unity’s two pilots, Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, and three Galactic employees – Beth Moses, Colin Bennett and Sirisha Bandla.
Sir Richard billed the flight as a test of the space tourism experience he expects to begin selling to customers from next year.
Some 600 individuals have already paid deposits for tickets that will cost them up to $250,000 (£180,000).
These are all people who want to reach a height where they can see the sky turn black and marvel at the Earth’s horizon as it curves away into the distance. Such a flight should also afford them about five minutes of weightlessness during which they will be allowed to float around inside Unity’s cabin.
It’s been a long road for Sir Richard to get to this point. He first announced his intention to make a space plane in 2004, with the belief he could start a commercial service by 2007.
But technical difficulties, including a fatal crash during a development flight in 2014, have made the space project one of the most challenging ventures of his career.
“I’ve wanted to go to space since I was a kid, and I want to enable hopefully hundreds of thousands of other people over the next 100 years to be able to go to space,” Sir Richard told the BBC before Sunday’s flight.
“And why shouldn’t they go to space? Space is extraordinary; the Universe is magnificent. I want people to be able to look back at our beautiful Earth and come home and work very hard to try to do magic to it to look after it.”
Space tourism is a sector being rekindled after a decade’s hiatus, and it’s about to get very competitive.
