Virgin Galactic completes first commercial flight into space

Virgin Galactic's passenger rocket plane VSS Unity. About 800 tickets for trips on the aircraft have been sold at a cost of up to $450,000 per seat. Photograph: Joe Skipper/Reuters

Sir Richard Branson officially entered the billionaire space tourism race on Thursday when his Virgin Galactic rocket plane, Unity, reached an altitude of about 53 miles.

Two Italian air force colonels and an aerospace engineer from the National Research Council of Italy joined a Virgin Galactic instructor and the plane’s two pilots on the 90-minute suborbital ride, which was streamed around the world.