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The spacecraft Virgin Galactic reached an altitude above 88 km Friday, carrying for the first time a pbadenger in addition to its two pilots.
SpaceShipTwo, built by British billionaire Richard Branson to transport tourists into space, was launched from the Mojave Desert in California and flew at an altitude of 55.87 miles (89.9 km), announced the company.
The American definition of space is all that is more than 50 miles above sea level. The Virgin spacecraft successfully reached an altitude of 50.9 miles for the first time in December.
At the time, Branson announced with great fanfare that it was the first time since NASA, since the end of its space shuttle program in 2011, that an American ship was carrying humans in the air. 39; space.
However, the Virgin vessel has still not crossed the internationally recognized border between the outer atmosphere and the land space, known as the Karman Line, which is set at 100 km altitude.
"SpaceShipTwo, welcome to space," wrote Virgin Galactic during its updated tweets throughout the event, with no live broadcast footage.
The spacecraft traveled at a speed of Mach 3, three times the speed of sound as it ascended, and landed safely at the Mojave Spaceport.
It is designed to carry six pbadengers, but test flights are years behind in large part because of an accident that killed a test pilot in 2014.
Branson told AFP earlier this month that he hoped that test flights would be sufficiently advanced in July to be able to join a flight.
For the first time on Friday, the plane was carrying a pbadenger, Beth Moses of Virgin Galactic, who would be responsible for training the company 's future tourists in the space.
To take off from the ground, SpaceShipTwo is carried by another larger aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, which looks like a combination of two planes attached by their wingtips.
When he is high enough, he releases the spaceship that lights his own rocket engine and climbs for about a minute in space.
At the climax, his pbadengers float in weightlessness for several minutes. He then descends again on the airstrip.
Branson's main rival is Blue Origin, created by the founder of Amazon billionaire, Jeff Bezos.
Bezos told an audience in New York this week that his New Shepard suborbital vehicle would begin flying people later this year at an altitude higher than SpaceShipTwo.
"One of the problems that Virgin Galactic will eventually have to solve is that they are not flying over the Karman line, not yet," Space News quoted Bezos as saying.
New Shepard has already flown over the Karman line, but not with people on board.
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