What you are seeing is Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, or SS2, which completed its first test flight today.

Sir Richard Branson is certainly pleased as can be, and the SS2 took off at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. A carrier craft known as WhiteKinightTwo towed it 47,000 feet into the atmosphere and then the rockets kicked in to go faster than the speed of sound. It reached a height of 55,000 feet before came to a landing that was not a splashdown.

So, I suppose that we are on the way to space tourism, which is of course the end goal here. I don’t know how long it will take for all of us to have access to the expensive world of space travel, but Virgin Galactic predicts in 2015.

Source 1 and Source 2