Earlier today, the VSS Unity went supersonic during crewed tests, reaching speeds of 1,220 miles per hour. It’s the first powered flight of Virgin Galactic’s new SpaceShipTwo aircraft, and the first flight since the 2014 disaster in which a pilot was killed and a co-pilot severely injured.
Richard Branson could play a part in our upcoming star wars. The billionaire’s satellite-launch company Virgin Orbit has started a new venture, Vox Space, aimed at wooing government clients.
Let’s talk about a few facts. Billionaire party enthusiast Richard Branson owns a private isle in the Virgin Islands. Branson’s island sits squarely in the path of Hurricane Irma, one the strongest storms the Atlantic has ever seen. Rather than retreat to a safer location, Branson has collected a mysterious group of…
“I hope in five years a reusable rocket will have been developed which can take up to 10 people at a time to stay at the Virgin Hotel for two weeks,” Richard Branson proudly announced back in 1999.
On Saturday, with the large grin of Richard Branson to see it off, Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, completed its first free flight over the Mojave Desert.
In a new blog post for Virgin.com, billionaire Richard Branson writes about his recent flirtation with death, when he got into a gruesome bike accident while training for the Virgin Strive Challenge in the Caribbean.
Sometimes, life gives you lemons. And then sometimes, it gives you Sir Richard Branson dressed as a mermaid, gazing happily at the camera as if to say, “My lifelong dream was not, in fact, to become an obscenely wealthy entrepreneur, but rather to bask in shallow waters with my fellow merpeople.”
Two years ago, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceshipTwo, the space plane it hoped to use to send tourists into space, failed on a test flight and crashed in the desert. Now, it’s revealed a brand new version of SpaceShipTwo.
Space tourism sounds pretty fun, if exorbitantly expensive. The ticket to ride is far from the only pricy thing about it. Building a spaceport for launches and returns costs hundreds of millions. So why does Sir Richard Branson now want to build one in the UK, right after finishing one in America—which isn’t even…
Space cowboy Richard Branson and his company, Virgin Galactic, showed off a 747-400 airplane that could launch rocket payloads from the air straight into orbit.
Virgin broke ground on a new hotel in New York on Friday and, as a courtesy to future generations, they buried a time capsule. That’s the capsule on the far left, and Richard Branson kissing the shoe of Melissa Hill from the U.S. Department of Commerce on the right. Why is Sir Richard Branson kissing a Commerce…
In addition to Richard Branson's lofty ambitions in space, the entrepeneur-explorer also has a project to send paying customers to the bottom of the ocean. Or, rather, had: it seems that very quietly, and with none of the fanfare surrounding the original launch, Virgin has shelved its current deep-sea project.
Virgin Galactic is reporting that there has been an "in-flight anomaly" aboard SpaceShipTwo. The suborbital flight took off at 9:19am PDT from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Update: Virgin Galactic has confirmed that SpaceshipTwo has crashed and the California Highway Patrol has confirmed that there is …
We've known about DARPA's plan to build a reusable, unmanned space plane for quite some time, but the agency just announced the companies that will help. Unsurprisingly, two feature famous billionaires who love space.
Back in 2012, I saw a sign outside of a travel agency in Western Australia that filled my cold, black heart with glee. It was an ad for Virgin Galactic, with the implied promise that if I stepped inside that door, I could buy a flight to space from an “accredited space agent.”
Back in 1988, Richard Branson appeared on the BBC show "Going Live!" and fielded a call from a kid named Shihan Musafer. Shihan's question: "Have you ever thought about going into space?" 26 years later, the commercial spaceline Shihan inspired is poised to launch its first flight – and Branson wants help tracking…
If you're one of the 700 or so people who bought tickets to fly to outer space on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic rockets, don't pack your space bags just yet: Smithsonian notes that the company doesn't have the Federal Aviation Administration permit required to take passengers to space. Hope you folks got…
Congratulations to all aspiring crypto-currency cosmonauts out there; you'll soon be able to use Bitcoin, everyone's favorite pseudomonetary bubble, to book flights on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space boats.
There are rich people. There are multi-millionaires. And then there's Richard Branson. The forever-young fellow is a cartoon character of a billionaire with everything from his own space tourism company to his own private island. But it's cool because he's willing to share.
William Shatner decided not to boldly go into orbit, on board Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic spaceship. According to Branson, this is because Shatner is "scared of airline travel." Probably because of those gremlins on the wing, right?