Richard Branson Rode A Plane Into Space

Fifty-nine years ago this week, on July 17, 1962, an American pilot, Robert White, flew an X-15 space plane to an altitude of about 315,000 feet (59.6 mi/95.9 km), while reaching a top speed of 3,831 mph (roughly Mach 5). https://t.co/sjIm1Vnh89

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) July 11, 2021

For the record, Branson went only 53 miles up. "Space" starts at 50 miles up.

All the young reporters on MSNBC and NBC are giddy with the prospect of watching Branson's plane get taken up that high and land shortly thereafter without power.  They are old enough to have grown up when "Space Camp" was a thing of their childhood, and when their 4 year old children (they tell all of this on the air) can be excited by this event.

And I feel incredibly old.  I don't remember Robert White (I was 7 at the time), but I remember Alan Shepherd's suborbital flight, and then John Glenn's circumnavigation of the globe in space.

So pardon me if I'm not that thrilled with billionaires trying to set up commercial space flights that will....go up and come back down soon?  At the cost of $250,000 per ticket; but with more flights that price will come down!  

For what?

Somehow, Richard Branson in suborbital flight doesn’t fill me with wonder.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 11, 2021

Alan Shephard rode the Freedom 7 capsule 161.5 miles into space; and it was still a "suborbital" flight. I have no idea how high Jeff Bezos plans to go. But it's all been done before, and by better men. The commercial possibilities of this seem to me to fall somewhere between the Concorde and the DeLorean.