In photos: Richard Branson’s historic space flight

Richard Branson, through his company Virgin Galactic, is now the first billionaire to travel to space aboard a spacecraft he helped fund.

It happened nine days before the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, is scheduled to make his own spaceflight.

Since the early 2000s, Branson and Bezos have been vying to develop, test and launch suborbital rockets that can take wealthy thrill-seekers on brief rides a few dozen miles above Earth. Their efforts have long been framed as a “billionaire space race.”