Just a week after the Fourth of July, a rocket launched high above California’s Mojave Desert. This was no mere tardy display of patriotism; the rocket’s launching team had been preparing for this moment for over four years. On July 10, Sir Richard Branson’s space startup Virgin Orbit fired the rocket at an altitude of 35,000 feet from a modified airplane. The effort was a “drop test,” meaning the rocket plunged to the earth rather than soaring into space, but for more reasons than this, it’s considered groundbreaking.