Woohoo!! This is so cool God, I wish I could have been there to see either of the launches. I hope this encourages new interest in space and space craft.

The cool thing is Branson, chair of Virgin Air, is licensing the spacecraft to start Virgin Galactic, where suborbital joyrides will be available to the rich at $200,000 a pop. Still completely out of my reach, but just the fact this is available in a few years (hopefully), means space travel will be more accessible than before (when only a few NASA astronauts ever got to experience it).

So when’s the first spaceport open? Check out the CNN article on SSO winning the X Prize. To close, here’s a fantastic shot of the craft on takeoff, straight out of a sci-fi movie.