The future of public space travel spread its wings for the first time Monday at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California as Virgin Galactic's inaugural SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceship took to the skies attached to its enormous mothership.

The carrier plane and suborbital spaceship were built for British billionaire Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic spaceliner fleet.

According to observers at the site, the aircraft-spaceship combo flew for roughly three hours. Conditions at Mojave for the test flight were described as being a beautiful day with a slight breeze.

SpaceShipTwo is the prototype for the world's first commercial passenger spaceship, destined to take private astronauts into suborbital space and paving the way for space transportation.

Taking flight

The WK2/SS2 is a space launch system being built by the aerospace company Scaled Composites in Mojave. The company was founded in 1982 by aerospace designer, Burt Rutan, and also built the smaller SpaceShipOne suborbital craft that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for reusable, manned suborbital spacecraft in 2004.

Over the years, Scaled has accumulated broad experience in air vehicle design, tooling and manufacturing, specialty composite structure design, analysis and fabrication, and developmental flight tests of air and space vehicles.

The first SS2 sports the name Virgin Space Ship (VSS) Enterprise. The debut WhiteKnightTwo mothership is named Eve after Branson's mother.