Richard Branson becomes first billionaire to travel to space on own ship

Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, has become the first billionaire to travel to space in his own spaceship.

Branson, 71, has stolen the spotlight from Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, who had earlier announced his plan to travel to space on July 20.

The businessman travelled to space with five members of his crew on a Virgin Galactic spaceship, known as VSS Unity.

They lifted off from Spaceport America in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and the VSS Unity reached a peak altitude of more than 282,000 feet.

After returning from the space trip, Branson described the experience as “magical”.

Branson said he has dreamed of travelling to space since he was a child and he hopes to be able to help many people make the trip in future.

“We’re here to make space more accessible to all. We want to turn the next generation of dreamers into the astronauts of today and tomorrow,” he said.

“We’ve all us on this stage have had the most extraordinary experience, and we’d love it if a number of you can have it, too. If you ever had a dream, now is the time to make it come true. I’d like to end by saying welcome to the dawn of a new space age.

“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.

“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.”

Virgin Galactic, Branson’s company, plans to begin commercial space flight services in 2022.