Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity Spaceplane Successfully Completes First Free Flight

Virgin Galactic — the aerospace firm founded by the British billionaire Richard Branson — successfully carried out the first free flight test run of its latest SpaceShipTwo plane VSS Unity. The plane, which took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California Saturday morning, glided back to the runway ten minutes after separating from the WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane.

"As expected, for this first gliding test flight, VSS Unity was flying light and slow, achieving a maximum speed of approximately Mach 0.6 while gliding home from an altitude of 50,000 feet," Virgin Galactic said in a statement released Saturday. "An initial look at the data as well as feedback from our two pilots indicate that today’s flight went extremely well, but we’ll take the time to properly and thoroughly analyze the vehicle’s performance before clearing the vehicle for our next test."

The successful glide flight run comes less than three months after the company carried out the first test flight of its SpaceShipTwo plane since October 2014, when its previous SpaceShipTwo plane — the VSS Enterprise — crashed and killed one of its pilots.

During the nearly four-hour captive carry flight in September, the VSS Unity, which the company touted as the first spaceship built entirely by the Spaceship Company — Virgin Galactic’s manufacturing arm — remained tethered to a “mothership.”

Virgin Galactic’s space program is crucially different from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — both of which are currently working on rockets that can put payloads into orbit and eventually carry humans to Mars. Virgin Galactic has so far focused its efforts primarily on space tourism with the goal of using its air-launched SpaceShipTwo planes to take passengers to the upper edge of Earth’s atmosphere — roughly 62 miles above Earth's surface.

According to some reports, nearly 700 people have already signed up, despite the hefty price tag of $250,000 per ticket. However, it is not yet clear when the first commercial flights would begin, and the company has previously said that it would do so only when it is satisfied that the flights can be carried out safely.

"Our team of flight test experts has developed a set of requirements for each planned test flight as well as detailing exactly what we need to test in order to be ready to proceed to the next phase of rocket powered flights. We will fly as many flights as we need to in order to achieve all these objectives," Virgin Galactic said in a statement last month.