Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space plane has conducted the first of three key test flights that should enable it to enter commercial service.

“It was a beautifully elegant experience,” said Sir Richard, who was watching from the ground.

“We had the backdrop of New Mexico, the mountains with the Sun coming up; we could see the spaceship clearly from the ground just going straight up. And, yeah, burning, burning, burning, until it finally disappeared into space,” the businessman told BBC News.

The next flight should see four of Sir Richard’s Virgin Galactic employees join the pilots – to get a sense of the experience that future ticketed customers will enjoy. The identity of this quartet has yet to be revealed, even within the company itself.

The flight after that would see Sir Richard himself go to the edge of space – as a statement of readiness for commercial service.

And it’s then on the subsequent outing that the company is expected to start earning revenues from carrying passengers. That’s a mission that has been purchased by the Italian Air Force, which is going to put several payload specialists aboard Unity to supervise a number of microgravity experiments.

It’s been a long road for Virgin Galactic’s engineers to get the system to where they want it, with progress over the past year stymied in part by the Covid crisis. But CEO Michael Colglazie said the project was now firmly on track, especially with respect to FAA licensing.

“It was such a perfect flight. We’ll get the data off the ship and give it to the FAA. That’ll be our homework turned in. We believe we’ve now collected everything we need for the final points on our commercial licence,” he explained.

The move to commercial service can’t come soon enough. Space tourism is a sector being rekindled after a decade’s hiatus, and it’s about to get very competitive.

Throughout the 2000s, seven wealthy individuals paid to visit the International Space Station (ISS). But this adventurism, organised under the patronage of the Russian space agency, ceased in 2009.

Now, new initiatives abound. As well as Sir Richard’s approach, there are projects coming from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and California tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.

The Russians, too, are reprising their commercial flights to the ISS, and there are even those who want to launch private space stations for people to visit. Among these is Axiom, a company started by a former Nasa ISS programme manager.

Sir Richard said he was busy getting himself ready for his own spaceflight later this year. “I’ll have a whole day of training tomorrow. And, oh my god, I’m looking forward to it. It’s ridiculously exciting. Our chief astronaut Dave Mackay just turned to me and said, ‘Richard, you’re gonna love it’,” he told BBC News.