It took just 59 minutes for Sir Richard Branson to fulfil his childhood dream. On Sunday morning, at the Spaceport launch station in the New Mexico desert, the 70-year-old British billionaire climbed aboard the VSS Unity. His cheeks puffed as the rocket blasted through a cloudless sky, reaching a high point of 89 kilometres above the Earth’s surface.

At the top, Sir Richard and his five fellow astronauts floated around for several minutes in a state of weightlessness. They would have been able to see about half of America’s land mass, including the white snow-capped mountains of the Rockies, plus the striking blue of the Pacific Ocean – a view that “sticks in your soul”, according to American astronaut Beth Moses, who was also on board.

The Telegraph London