For years, British billionaire Richard Branson vowed that commercial space flights with his firm Virgin Galactic were just around the corner.
On Thursday, that hype finally became reality when three Italian researchers boarded the VSS Unity space plane as Virgin Galactic's first paying passengers and flew about four minutes in suborbital space.
The researchers — Col. Walter Villadei and Lt. Col. Angelo Landolfi of the Italian Air Force and Pantaleone Carlucci, an engineer with the National Research Council of Italy — spent their precious minutes in microgravity conducting scientific research on topics ranging from cognitive performance to physiological responses in space.
