Race to Space: Richard Branson to travel to space on July 11, ahead of Jeff Bezos

British billionaire Richard Branson plans to beat fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos to space. Branson’s company, Virgin Galactic announced on Thursday that he will attempt to fly in Virgin’s rocket-powered plane on July 11. Nine days before the launch of Jeff Bezos’ Blue origin. 

This surprise announcement has put Branson in a position to become the first billionaire to travel to space abroad in spacecraft. Virgin Galactic program had planned to start flying customers years ago but its development program was set back by several mishaps,  including a 2014 test fight accident that resulted in the death of a co-pilot. 

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Branson has frequently said that he’s not interested in “racing” to space. During a recent interview, he told CNN Business’ Rachel Crane that people has turned it into a race. He said, “It would be very dangerous to say turn it into a race. And the moment we have every boxed ticked, I will go up and then we will invite some of the people who have signed up to go with us — but we honestly don’t see it as a race.”

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Branson and Bezos have been vying to develop, test, and launch suborbital rockets since the early 2000s, that could take wealthy thrillseekers on brief, 2,300 -mile-per-hour rides a few dozen miles above Earth. Their efforts have long been framed as a “billionaire space race.”

Meanwhile, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk‘s name is also often thrown around in the “space race” game, but SpaceX rockets are far more powerful than the suborbital tourism rockets built by Bezos and Branson.