The space plane "Unity" travelled 54 miles above Earth, providing a great view and a few minutes of weightlessness. Virgin Galactic hide caption
Virgin Galactic
Richard Branson, seen here in 2019, will head to space on his company Virgin Galactic's Unity 22 mission. Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
Virgin Galactic's space tourism rocket plane SpaceShipTwo returns after a test flight in California on Dec. 13, 2018. Billionaire Richard Branson is partnering with a group of investors to take his space tourism company public. Gene Blevins/Reuters hide caption
Observers watch Virgin Galactic's SpaceshipTwo take off for a suborbital test flight of the VSS Unity in Mojave, Calif. The company marked a major milestone Thursday as Unity made it to a peak height of more than 51 miles, meeting the Federal Aviation Administration's definition of spaceflight. Gene Blevins/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
Wally Funk is one of the Mercury 13, a group of women who trained to be astronauts in the early 1960s. Courtesy of Wally Funk hide caption
A photo released by Virgin Galactic shows a badly injured SpaceShipTwo pilot Peter Siebold drifting under his parachute after last October's accident that destroyed the spacecraft during a test flight. Mark Greenberg/Virgin Galactic hide caption
SpaceShipTwo crashed in the Mojave Desert in California on Oct. 31. The co-pilot was killed. Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP hide caption
The unique folding tail section of the Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo may have been a factor in the crash. Virgin Galactic hide caption
File photo of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. Reed Saxon/AP hide caption
Wreckage lies near the site where a Virgin Galactic space tourism rocket, SpaceShipTwo, exploded and crashed in Mojave, Calif. Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP hide caption
In a photo released by Scaled Composites, Michael Alsbury, who was killed while co-piloting the test flight of Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo on Friday, Oct. 31, 2014, is shown. Scaled Composites/AP hide caption
Wreckage lies near the site where a Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, crashed in Mojave, Calif., on Friday. Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP hide caption
The commercial space ship, pictured here in an earlier test flight, crashed in the California desert. Mark Greenberg/Virgin Galactic hide caption