Richard Branson – the first billionaire to fly to space

Richard Branson, Virgin Group’s 70-year-old British Founder became the first billionaire with his own space company to travel to space, on Sunday. Branson travelled to space on Virgin Galactic’s first fully-crewed flight aboard the VSS Unity spaceplane that lifted off from New Mexico. He achieved this milestone nine days before Jeff Bezos, who’s flying to space on July 20.

Among the experiments that flew to space on Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity spaceplane, today, were a NASA-backed experiment having three tubes containing Arabidopsis thaliana plants. According to NASA, data collected during the flight will provide a “first look at human-tended payloads on SpaceShipTwo.”

It’s been a long journey for Richard Branson to get to this milestone. The billionaire back in 2004 announced his plan to make a space plane with the expectation he’d have a commercial service ready by 2007, which couldn’t be made possible then and technical difficulties, including a fatal crash during a development flight in 2014 later, made the space project one of the most challenging ventures of his career.

Elon Musk, world’s second-richest person, met Richard Branson ahead of the Virgin Group’s billionaire Founder’s scheduled flight to space. The 70-year-old shared a picture with Musk and tweeted, “Big day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend.” “Will see you there to wish you the best,” Musk had earlier tweeted to Branson.

Second Indian-born woman to fly into space with Richard Branson

Sirisha Bandla, one of the astronauts flying with billionaire Richard Branson on Virgin Galactic’s first fully-crewed rocket-powered test flight became the only second India-born woman astronaut to travel to space after late Kalpana Chawla. Bandla was born in Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur and grew up in the US. She graduated in aeronautical engineering from Purdue University.