“IT WILL BE humbling. It will be spiritual.” This is how Virgin Galactic wooed customers with the prospect of a few minutes in space in 2004. Within five years, the space-tourism firm claimed, it would take a total of over 3,000 passengers on life-changing jaunts in its spaceships. On July 11th, after a last 90-minute delay, Virgin Galactic finally began to make good on that promise. Its VSS Unity rocket plane was released from a support aircraft, fired up an engine that accelerated it to three times the speed of sound and soared 85km above Earth’s surface. Thence, for four minutes, its six temporarily weightless passengers, including the firm’s
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