By Captain Pyke | July 18, 2010 - 9:43 pm

Virgin Galactic's flagship vessel, aptly named Enterprise, embarked on it's first crewed flight July 15th. The ship remained attached to it's mothership VMS Eve for the duration of the 6hr 12min flight. Crew members Peter Siebold and Michael Alsbury evaluated all of the spaceship’s systems and functions from end to end in the air.

According to the Virgin Galactic website, the mission was a success or as they reported, "objectives achieved". With the VSS Enterprise announcement last year revealing it's iconic name, Virgin Galactic has been on roll completing Enterprise's first captive carry flight in March of this year. VSS Enterprise is the first in a planned series of commercial spacecraft that will ferry tourists into suborbital flight, the first of it's kind, and then return gliding to Earth and landing in the New Mexico desert.

Born out of the Ansari X PRISE and Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, VSS Enterprise earned it's name from Trek and is a close cousin to the X PRISE winning spaceship, SpaceShipOne, which now resides in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

Virgin Galactic is a company within Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group which plans to provide sub-orbital spaceflights to the paying public, along with suborbital space science missions and orbital launches of small satellites. Further in the future Virgin Galactic hopes to offer orbital human spaceflights as well. (wikipedia)

Learn more about Virgin Galactic here.