A speechless ticketholder for one of the first tourist flights to space says her childhood dream will soon become a reality as she watched Sir Richard Branson make history overnight.
1 NEWS US correspondent Anna Burns-Francis has been in New Mexico for the launch of Branson's Unity 22 spaceship, in his quest to be the world's first tourist to the edge of space.
The nearly 71-year-old beat out fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos.
After a short rain delay, the crew of four were taken up in a glider carried by the mothership, before detaching and boosting up.
The team on board experienced forces up to 3.5GS - a feeling like being on a roller coaster than never ends.
Once they hit around 80 kilometres above Earth, they were weightless for a few minutes before coming back down.
After an hour-an-a-half, Branson and his team landed safely back on Earth.
The trip is the ultimate sale pitch for Virgin Galactic- it wants passengers on board by next year.
"We're here to make space more accessible to all and we want to turn the next generation of dreamers into the astronauts of today and tomorrow," Branson said.
Today's flight brings mankind one step closer to space tourism - but at what cost?
Tickets for a trip to space will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the company's saving two seats on one of its next voyages for sweepstakes winners.
Among the first to get to take up the opportunity is Lina Borozdina who snapped up her ticket in 2005.
"I'm a future astronaut and I'm here to witness my dream coming true," she told Burns-Francis ahead of Branson's take off.
"When I was a little girl, when I was five-years-old, my dad used to tuck me into bed and tell me bedtime stories about getting stowed away on a spaceship with my cousin, that we used to go in there, hide and go in space, and come out in zero gravity and have space adventures of all kinds of space aliens.
"It's kind of instilled a love of space, I'm a huge sci-fi nerd, I'm a scientist and this has been my dream of a childhood."
She said her excitement meant she hasn't slept every much in the lead up to Branson's flight
"I can't even find words for it, it's amazing, it's fabulous, it's mind-boggling and it's future is now."
Borozdina also joked it was her "mission in space to tell the flat-Earthers to go and f*** themselves".
However, while one of Branson's friends - David Tait - told Burns-Francis from Spaceport America "it's about time" - he admitted that he wouldn't have climbed aboard today's first flight if his mate had of offered him a ticket.
David Tait says it's been "an incredible challenge" for Branson to become the first person to blast off his own spaceship.
"It's been next year's project, not for the whole 18 years, but certainly for the last five to seven of them. "But it's an incredible complex thing when you think about what NASA had to got through, all of the government funding behind it to get into space, for a private enterprize to take this on is an incredible challenge," he said.
"If it were easy everyone would be doing it ... and things go wrong, as sadly they've found out with the accident."
The risks to Branson and his crew were underscored in 2007, when a rocket motor test in California’s Mojave Desert left three workers dead, and in 2014, when a Virgin Galactic rocket plane broke apart during a test flight, killing one pilot and seriously injuring the other.
However, Tait said Branson was "like a little child" who would do the opposite of what he's told.
The flamboyant, London-born founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways wasn't supposed to fly until later this summer. But he assigned himself to an earlier flight after Bezos announced plans to ride his own rocket into space from Texas on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Branson, who has kite-surfed the English Channel and attempted to circle the world in a hot-air balloon, denied he was trying to beat Bezos.
The 1 NEWS US correspondent watched the moment alongside Branson's family, friends and international media in New Mexico.
Tait said space tourism was just "the tip off the iceberg".
"I think this can be changed into a form of international travel which will be really meaningful," he said.
"I think the number of people who can spend this kind of money on a few minutes of weightlessness is not a huge opportunity, obviously the price will come down as they perfect it and go into bigger mass production."
SHARE ME