Point to point suborbital travel In 2016 TSC, Virgin Galactic and the Virgin Group began a collaboration with Boom Technology to develop a supersonic trans-oceanic passenger jetliner. A mission concept review of a Mach 3 vehicle design was carried out. Competition Virgin Galactic is not the only corporation pursuing suborbital spacecraft for tourism. Blue Origin is developing suborbital flights with its New Shepard spacecraft. Although initially more secretive about its plans, Jeff Bezos company has developed a spacecraft that takes off and lands vertically and can carry four people to the edge of space. New Shepard first flew above the Karman line and landed in 2015 and the same vehicle was reflown to above the Karman line again in 2016. On 20 July 2021, they flew the first paying customer. On 16 September 2014, SpaceX and Boeing were awarded contracts as part of NASA's CCtCap program to develop their Crew Dragon and CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, respectively. Both are capsule designs to bring crew to orbit, a different commercial market than that addressed by Virgin Galactic. Now-defunct XCOR Aerospace had also worked on rocket-powered aircraft during many of the years that Virgin Galactic had; XCOR's Lynx suborbital vehicle was under development for more than a decade, and its predecessor, the XCOR EZ-Rocket experimental rocket powered airplane did actually take flight, but the company closed its doors in 2017. Notable accomplishments First launch of founder into space On 11 July 2021 Virgin Galactic became the first spaceflight company to independently launch a founder of the company into space, using the high US definition of space, having flown founder Richard Branson above the mark on flight Unity 22. This sub-orbital flight was accomplished using the twin-fuselage aircraft launch platform VMS Eve, coupled together with VSS Unity, enabling Branson, three other employee passengers and the two pilots to experience approximately three minutes of weightlessness above Earth’s atmosphere. The entire flight lasted approximately one hour, taking off and landing at Spaceport America facility near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. This flight had originally been scheduled to occur later in the summer; however, shortly after the announcement of competitor Blue Origin's plans to fly Amazon founder Jeff Bezos into space on 20 July 2021, the Virgin Galactic flight was rescheduled to occur on 11 July 2021. Virgin Galactic has been certified by the FAA to provide commercial spaceflight travel, and its accounts report that over 600