Two of Richard Branson's space tourism planes—SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo—lifted off on their first test flights in nine months today, but at some point during the test SpaceShipTwo suffered what Virgin is calling an "in-flight anomaly," killing one pilot and injuring another. Authorities confirmed the casualty in…

Virgin Galactic, the space-tourism business launched by ruddy cartoon businessman Richard Branson, pulled off its first successful rocket-powered flight yesterday, bringing the world one step closer to a future in which rich people can go to space, for a little while.

A 12-person fight broke out at 30,000 feet on a Virgin flight from England headed to Barbados. It had to be broken up by crew and other passengers. But what got the whole thing started?

Cross-branding master Richard Branson is boldly going where only billionaires can go with the inaugural flight of his new spaceship. Soon, rich people can travel into space and be a captive audience to the Greatest Salesman of All Time.

The Way We Live Now: Eking out a hard living in cubicle hell while beauty dies, duh. We work without music. We work without pay. We work without jobs, just to say "Hey, one day."

Ireland's Sunday Business Post savages Virgin chief Richard Branson for the $3 billion pledge he made two years ago to invest all the profits from his air and rail-transport businesses into cleantech. The Post notes that Branson's green technology of choice, biofuels, has fallen out of favor, as scientists and…

Save your blog drama for Obama. Boing Boing starship trooper Xeni Jardin posted close-up photos of fun-loving Virgin billionaire Richard Branson's new space tourism plane, Eve, from yesterday's big debut event.
(Photo by Brian Lam)

We knew that the hip, priced-to-fly airline had cool purple lighting and probably on-board porn or whatever, but did we know that Virgin America also provides their delayed passengers with live entertainment, including three-card monte? From a tipster:

Helio backer SK Telecom, the Korean wireless giant, is in negotiations to purchase Virgin Mobile USA. The plan: combine the two properties and then invest enough in Sprint Nextel to get all three companies working together. Sprint already runs the network over which Helio and Virgin run their cell-phone services.…

We were right: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales really did skip off to Richard Branson's Caribbean getaway in early March, even as a scandal unfolded over his governance of the world's most comprehensive list of gay animals. The powwow on Necker Island, which included Google's Larry Page, Tesla Motors chairman Elon…

Some IPOs — like Google and VMWare—are impressive from the start. Others — like Vonage, which has fallen 85 percent since going public — fall flat. Virgin Mobile, with its cherry brand name and backers, should have had a sparkling debut. And yet it didn't.

You're going to have to cancel your Wednesday lunch date at Michael's, just this once, because at 1:30 PM tomorrow Kevin Federline will be in Times Square (or so say the flacks — you can't expect K-Fed to know where he's going to be this far in advance). He will be joined by Sir Richard Branson, creating a Power…