TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, New Mexico—A twin-fuselage jet took off carrying Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane with a three-man crew from Italy into the New Mexico sky on Thursday for a high-altitude launch of the company’s first flight of paying customers to the edge of space.
The two Italian air force colonels and an aerospace engineer from the National Research Council of Italy were strapped into the spaceplane with their Virgin Galactic instructor and its two pilots, poised for a suborbital ride expected to take the six men about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the desert floor.
The flight marks a decisive moment for Virgin Galactic Holding Inc., the space tourism venture founded by British billionaire Richard Branson in 2004, as it inaugurates commercial service following several years fraught with development setbacks….