British entrepreneur and Virgin founder Richard Branson will fly to space aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity plane for the company’s next suborbital flight, the most high-profile launch since its founding in 2004.

Richard Branson says he isn’t racing ex-Amazon CEO and richest-man-in-the-world Jeff Bezos into space, but it certainly looks that way. The British billionaire is set to join five others on a Virgin Galactic test flight to space on July 11, just over a week ahead of Bezos’ planned space flight with his brother on July 20 aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft.

Virgin Galactic claims it began planning Branson’s flight before last month’s announcement that Jeff and Mark Bezos would launch to the edge of space with the winner of a multi-million-dollar auction. But whatever the reason, this sudden rush to get into space at least appears to be the result of an intense rivalry among the entrepreneurs and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Dubbed the ‘NewSpace’ set, Bezos, Branson and Musk all say they were inspired by the first moon landing in 1969, when the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in the space race. They have each pumped billions of dollars into their respective start-ups with the aim of creating cheap, commercialized space travel.

What happens now? Branson is set to fly into space on Sunday, July 11, while Bezos will board the New Shepherd on July 20. SpaceX started crewed flights in May 2020, but Musk has yet to fly on a mission, despite once saying he’d like to “die on Mars”.. SpaceX is renting out its Dragon space capsule this fall for its first private spaceflight, taking a crew of four on a three-day orbital odyssey.

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