Virgin Galactic successfully completed a six-person flight to the edge of space on its Unity spacecraft on May 25which took off and landed at the Mojave Spaceport in New Mexico.

The flight, dubbed Unity 25, lasted about 20 minutes — according to the company’s Twitter account — and was crewed by two experienced pilots and four passengers, all Virgin Galactic employees. This is the company’s first manned mission in nearly two years.

Virgin Galactic had advertised this mission as a “final evaluation of the complete spaceflight system and astronaut experience” before commercial flights began with paying customers, the details say. PS.

The flight followed the profile of previous Virgin Galactic missions. Virgin Galactic’s huge white transport plane, VMS Eve, lifted off from the company’s Spaceport America launch site in New Mexico, lifting Unity to an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,244 meters).

Eve then launched Unity and soon after, the pilots started the spaceplane’s hybrid rocket engine. Unity then ascended to the edge of space, more than 50 miles from Earth’s surface.

While the passengers on board experienced weightlessness for a few minutes, the pilots reconfigured the spaceplane to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and then slide the vehicle onto the runways where Unity landed like an airplane.

This type of suborbital spaceplane has only been to space four times before and has suffered technical problems during flights and a high-profile crash in 2014 that killed a pilot.

The company, which previously hoped to launch commercial space tourism services by the end of 2022, it also works to dispel any doubts about his financial viabilitydetail Bloomberg.