Richard Branson will fly into space on July 11, beating rival Jeff Bezos by 9 days
CBSN
Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic, will fly into space aboard his company's VSS Unity rocketplane on July 11 for an up-and-down test flight, beating Amazon-founder and rival Jeff Bezos into sub-orbital space by nine days.
The announcement from Virgin came just a few hours after Bezos announced that aviation pioneer Wally Funk will be joining him, his brother Mark and the yet-to-be named winner of an online auction for blastoff July 20 aboard his company's New Shepard spacecraft. Both Virgin Galactic and Bezos' Blue Origin are competing head-to-head in the emerging space tourism marketplace, both offering short rides just above the discernible atmosphere for a few minutes of weightlessness and spectacular views before returning to Earth.Ashley White received her earliest combat action badge from the United States Army soon after the first lieutenant arrived in Afghanistan. The silver military award, recognizing soldiers who've been personally engaged by an attacker during conflict, was considered an achievement in and of itself as well as an affirming rite of passage for the newly deployed. White had earned it for using her own body to shield a group of civilian women and children from gunfire that broke out in the midst of her third mission in Kandahar province. All of them survived. She never mentioned the badge to anyone in her battalion.