First of 3 billionaires makes trip out of this world

Branson announced last week that he would make his first space voyage in the VSS Unity. He is the first owner of a private space company to take his own spacecraft into space.

“I was once a child with a dream looking up to the stars. Now I’m an adult in a spaceship looking down to our beautiful Earth,” he said in a video from space.

He has touted the mission as a precursor to a new era of space tourism, with the company he founded in 2004 poised to begin commercial operations next year.

“We’re here to make space more accessible to all,” Branson said shortly after hugging his grandchildren after the flight. “Welcome to the dawn of a new Space Age.”

Bezos, 57, who retired as Amazon CEO on July 5, announced last month that he and his company Blue Origin will fly to space on July 20 on an 11-minute flight called the New Shepard — named after astronaut Alan Shepard, the second person and first US citizen to fly into space — with his brother Mark, 53.

Musk’s company SpaceX plans to send its first all-civilian crew (without Musk) into orbit in September, after having already launched numerous cargo payloads and astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA.

Bezos’ team claims that its flight will reach the true edge of space, going up 62 miles to Branson’s planned suborbital flight of 55 miles.

Blue Origin said that unlike Unity, Bezos’ New Shepard will top the 62-mile-high-mark (100 km), called the Kármán line, set by an international aeronautics body as defining the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space.

“New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name,” Blue Origin said on Twitter on Friday.

However, US space agency NASA and the US Air Force both define an astronaut as anyone who has flown higher than 50 miles (80 km).