Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and a crew of Virgin Galactic employees are airborne ahead of their rocket-powered ascent to space. A SpaceShipTwo spaceplane took off from New Mexico at 10:40AM ET Sunday, carried aloft by a WhiteKnight carrier plane. The mission, dubbed Unity 22, is the fourth test flight to space for the spaceplane and the first for Branson, the 70-year-old daredevil entrepreneur who’s been waiting over a decade for his debut trek out of Earth’s atmosphere.
About 50 minutes after takeoff, the SpaceShipTwo plane, dubbed VSS Unity, will drop from the center of Virgin Galactic’s twin-fuselage WhiteKnight plane at an altitude of around 45,000 feet. Moments later VSS Unity will ignite its single rocket engine to…
