Virgin Galactic launches its first tourist passengers into space

Virgin Galactic launched its first civilian passengers into space on Thursday, the company announced as part of the completion of a nearly two-decade programme for commercial space tourism.

The three passengers — 80-year-old Jon Goodwin, 46-year-old Keisha Schahaff, and her 18-year-old daughter Anastatia Mayers — were propelled past 80 kilometres (50 miles) in height, the point at which gravity has the least effect on Earth.

Keisha Schahaff is an Antigua and Barbuda health coach who won a competition that raised $1.7 million for the non-profit organisation Space for Humanity, which seeks to increase access to space, AFP reported.

"I always was interested in space as a little girl," she said in an interview in 2021. "This is a great opportunity for me to feel alive and to just make the greatest adventure ever."

Her daughter, Anastasia Mayers, an 18-year-old student at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland who is majoring in philosophy and physics, has also accompanied her mother on their space flight.

Jon Goodwin, is an 80-year-old adventurer who represented Great Britain as a canoeist in the 1972 Olympic Games. Goodwin, who received a Parkinson's disease diagnosis in 2014, is the second person with the condition to visit space.

The spaceflights offered by Virgin Galactic use a massive, twin-fuselage carrier aircraft that lifts off from a runway, climbs to altitude, and then lowers a rocket-powered spacecraft that flies into space alongside the passengers.

Before the spacecraft glides back to Earth, the passengers experience a brief period of weightlessness at a height of about 53 miles (85 kilometres).

Virgin Galactic was established in 2004 and has since sold about 800 tickets for seats on upcoming commercial flights: 600 between 2005 and 2014 for $200,000 to $250,000 each, and 200 more recently for $450,000 each.

With billionaire Jeff Bezos's company, Blue Origin, which has already launched 32 passengers into space using a vertical lift-off rocket, Virgin Galactic competes in the "suborbital" space tourism market.

However, Blue Origin's rocket has been grounded since an incident in September 2022 while it was flying unmanned. In March, the company said it would soon start up again.