The carrier aircraft for Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceplane made its first flight in more than a year Feb. 15 as the company moves one step closer to beginning commercial service.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...