July has been truly historic for the commercial spaceflight sector, with two rival companies both reaching suborbital flight with a full cohort of paying passengers for the very first time. On 11th July, Virgin Galactic achieved its first fully manned test flight to the edge of space, with owner Richard Branson himself as 'Astronaut 001' on board. The VSS Unity rocket was launched to an altitude of some 50,000 feet from a Virgin Galactic carrier plane, from where it used its own rocket power to reach the boundary of space. Crew experienced around four minutes of weightlessness before descending back to Earth. Branson beat rival Jeff Bezos by a matter of days, with Bezos having successfully launched himself to space on 20th July on board his Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft, which also carried his brother and 82-year-old Wally Funk, the oldest person (and woman) to ever fly in space, to an altitude of around 328,000 feet, where the crew members experienced around four minutes of weightlessness. The rocket then detached from the crew capsule for self-landing, while the capsule descended back to Earth.
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