A Virgin Galactic spacecraft flew more than 50 miles above the Mojave Desert in California on Thursday morning, climbing into the edge of space for about a minute, a crucial milestone in the race to make big-business space tourism a reality.

The craft, SpaceShipTwo, soared at speeds topping out at 2.9 times the speed of sound — around 2,200 miles per hour — through nearly three layers of Earth’s atmosphere to reach space, the company said. SpaceShipTwo topped out at an altitude of 51.4 miles, just surpassing the Federal Aviation Administration’s definition of where space begins but lower than the widely accepted boundary of 62 miles.

Thursday’s accomplishment gave Richard Branson, the British billionaire who started Virgin Galactic in 2004 with the objective of ferrying tourists on short flights into space, a victory in the highly competitive but elusive contest of commercial space tourism. SpaceShipTwo had two people on board, both pilots in the cockpit, but carried research payloads that simulated the weight of carrying passengers.