Branson vs Bezos: Who Reached Space First in July 2021?

Originally published 2021-06-13.

Richard Branson won the billionaire race to space. The Virgin founder rode Virgin Galactic's rocket plane VSS Unity to about 86 km (53.5 miles) on 11 July 2021, nine days before Jeff Bezos flew on Blue Origin's New Shepard capsule to about 107 km (66 miles) on 20 July. Elon Musk, the third name in that summer's headlines, did not fly at all; his company SpaceX sent a private crew into orbit in September 2021 without him.

In mid-June 2021 the outcome was still open. Bezos had just announced his seat on Blue Origin's first crewed flight, and Branson answered with a cheerful tweet that hinted he might get there first. Here is how that contest unfolded, why the two flights were very different machines doing very different things, and why the argument over who "really" reached space never quite went away.

The tweet that started the race talk

On 7 June 2021 Bezos said on Instagram that he and his brother Mark would be aboard New Shepard's first flight with people, planned for 20 July, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Branson replied the same day on Twitter, congratulating the brothers and pointing out that both companies had been building spacecraft for nearly two decades: Blue Origin since 2000, Virgin Galactic since 2004.

Many congratulations to @JeffBezos & his brother Mark on announcing spaceflight plans. Jeff started building @blueorigin in 2000, we started building @virgingalactic in 2004 & now both are opening up access to Space - how extraordinary! Watch this space…

— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) June 7, 2021

The sign-off, "Watch this space", was read everywhere as a hint. Virgin Galactic had not yet named a date, but the company was close to its next test flight, and reporters quickly worked out that a Branson flight could be squeezed in before 20 July. On 1 July Virgin Galactic confirmed it: Branson would fly on the Unity 22 mission on 11 July.

Branson's flight: Unity 22, 11 July 2021

VSS Unity is not a rocket that stands on a launch pad. It is a winged spaceplane carried under a twin-fuselage mothership, VMS Eve, to roughly 13 to 15 km (about 45,000 to 50,000 feet). There it drops free, fires its hybrid rocket motor for about a minute, and climbs almost vertically. Passengers get a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the curve of the Earth before the craft "feathers" its tail to slow down and glides back to a runway at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

On Unity 22 the two pilots were Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci. In the cabin, alongside Branson, were three Virgin Galactic employees: Beth Moses, the company's chief astronaut instructor; Colin Bennett, an operations engineer; and Sirisha Bandla, a vice-president for government affairs. The spaceplane topped out at about 86 km before gliding home, and the whole trip from release to landing took around a quarter of an hour.

The flight was suborbital. Unity never reaches the speed needed to circle the Earth, so it does not go into orbit, and its cabin carries two pilots plus up to four passengers. Some early descriptions spoke of a crew of six and two hours in orbit; neither is true of this vehicle.

Bezos's flight: New Shepard NS-16, 20 July 2021

Blue Origin's approach is the classic one. New Shepard is a reusable booster with a capsule on top, launched vertically from the company's site in West Texas. After separation, the booster lands itself upright on a pad, and the capsule, called RSS First Step on this mission, coasts above 100 km before parachuting back to the desert. No pilots are aboard; the system flies itself.

The NS-16 crew made headlines of its own. Next to Jeff and Mark Bezos sat Wally Funk, 82, one of the "Mercury 13" women who passed astronaut-style tests in the early 1960s but were never allowed to fly, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch student. That made them the oldest and youngest people to reach space at the time. The trip lasted just over ten minutes from lift-off to touchdown.

The fourth seat has its own story. Blue Origin auctioned it in June 2021, and in mid-June the bidding stood near $3 million. The winning bid eventually reached $28 million, but the winner chose to fly later, and Oliver Daemen's father, who had also bid, took the seat for his son instead.

Did both men really go to space?

This is the question that kept the rivalry alive after both capsules were back on the ground, and the honest answer is: it depends on where you draw the line.

• The Kármán line, 100 km. The international air sports body, the FAI, has long used 100 km as the edge of space. Bezos crossed it; Branson did not.
• The US line, 50 miles (about 80 km). NASA, the US Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration have used 50 miles for astronaut recognition. By that measure both flights count.

Blue Origin made the most of the difference, posting a chart before the flights that contrasted its capsule's altitude and large windows with Unity. Virgin Galactic replied that its crew had flown above the boundary used by US agencies. Both men did receive FAA commercial astronaut wings for 2021 flights. Shortly after, the FAA tightened the criteria and then, in December 2021, ended the wings programme, listing everyone who had flown above 50 miles on its honour roll instead.

Where Elon Musk fitted in

Musk came up in the June 2021 coverage because he had talked about flying to space himself one day. He set no date then and has not flown since. His company took a different route to private spaceflight: in September 2021 the Inspiration4 mission, paid for by businessman Jared Isaacman, put four private citizens into orbit for three days aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon. In technical terms that was a far bigger leap than either suborbital hop, even without its founder aboard.

It is worth separating the founders from the companies. SpaceX's business is orbital launch, carrying satellites, cargo and NASA astronauts. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic were, in 2021, mainly selling short tourist hops with a few minutes of weightlessness. Comparing them as one "race" makes for a fun headline, but they were not really competing for the same thing.

What the race led to

Branson's flight did not open the floodgates straight away. Virgin Galactic paused flights for an FAA review after Unity 22 drifted out of its assigned airspace during descent, and its first commercial mission, Galactic 01 with members of the Italian Air Force, flew only on 29 June 2023. Unity made its last flight, Galactic 07, on 8 June 2024, after which the company stopped flying to focus on a new generation of spaceships.

Blue Origin flew several more crewed New Shepard missions, carrying celebrities such as actor William Shatner in October 2021, before a rocket failure on an uncrewed flight in September 2022 grounded the system for more than a year.

The big lesson of July 2021 is that a handful of the world's richest people decided to buy their own way to the edge of space, and their companies proved that paying passengers could fly safely on short suborbital trips. Whether that becomes an everyday industry or stays a luxury for a few hundred people is still an open question.

Branson's long record of risky adventures

Few people who followed Branson's career were surprised he wanted to go first. Having built Virgin from a record shop and label into an airline, rail, mobile phone and finance brand, he spent much of the 1980s and 1990s on record attempts. With Swedish balloonist Per Lindstrand he made the first hot-air balloon crossings of the Atlantic (1987) and the Pacific (1991). His later attempts to circle the globe by balloon, some with Steve Fossett, all fell short. The space flight was in many ways the last and highest of those stunts.

Sources: Wikipedia, VSS Unity; Wikipedia, Blue Origin NS-16; Wikipedia, Richard Branson; FAA Commercial Human Space Flight Recognition; tweet by Richard Branson, 7 June 2021; first reported by Inverse.