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Nearly two years after Virgin Galactic’s last spaceflight, the company will once again take private citizens into space — private citizens with an extra $750,000. I started Accepting online reservations on Mondayat a price much higher than the $600,000 it charged for flights in 2023.
The following excursions will be conducted on the company’s new Delta Class aircraft, which can accommodate six passengers (up from four) and can fly twice a week. Virgin Galactic said it will test the new ship this summer and begin commercial flights in the fall. The company said that the first flights will be for research to collect data on how the ship is performing, and then passenger flights will begin 6 to 8 weeks after those research flights.
The company said that if all goes as planned, the first non-researcher passengers could travel to space before the end of the year.
The company will sell 50 tickets at $750,000 each, then pause sales after all tickets are sold. CEO Michael Colglazier said during the conference that the company will “work to raise our prices as we go forward” when sales resume Company earnings call Earlier this week. He said that they have not decided on future ticket prices.
A Virgin Galactic representative told CNET that the company will not announce how many of the 50 tickets have been sold so far or who the customers are.
A lot of people are waiting
Virgin Galactic won’t just fly new customers into space. There is a backlog of 675 people, which the company calls “founder astronauts” or “future astronauts” — people who paid deposits a decade ago for future flights. Because they paid years ago, their trip costs will be much lower than those of people who buy tickets now.
Future flights could include new customers and established astronauts from this backlog.
Virgin Galactic’s goal is to fly 10 flights a month by 2027, Colglazier said. That means about 60 passengers a month.
Significant investment has been made in space tourism, albeit by a few companies, since an engineer and an entrepreneur Dennis Tito became the first “space tourist” in 2001. Virgin Galactic has flown 23 customers into space, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has flown 98, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX has flown 98 customers. 20 have been taken. Axiom Space and Space Adventures – the lead company that handled Tito – have flown several customers to the International Space Station.
The space tourism market is expected to grow from $2.3 billion in 2026 to $47 billion by 2034, a 45% annual increase, for “entertainment, exploration and experiential travel outside the Earth’s atmosphere.” According to research firm Fortune Business Insights.
The Virgin Galactic news comes on the same day that NASA will launch the first human flight to the moon since 1972. Four astronauts — Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — will fly the Orion spacecraft around the moon, but not land on it, during the 10-day mission. CNET offers live updates and live streaming To launch.
Virgin Galactic’s last flight was Galactic 07 on June 8, 2024, aboard VSS Unity, its first spacecraft. It was the final voyage of a 12-voyage mission before the company began setting its sights on developing its Delta-class ships for longer customer voyages. Billionaire Richard Branson, who founded the company in 2004, made its inaugural flight on July 11, 2021.
“Shockingly thin blue line”
Ron Rosano, from San Rafael, California, has fulfilled his lifelong dream with… Its flight to Virgin Galactic is in 2023. He remembers the three minutes of weightlessness and gravitational forces created by the ship’s rocket launch.
Rosano told CNET that he remembers “the sight of this incredible miracle planet floating suspended in black, empty space, and seeing the shockingly thin blue line of our atmosphere at the edge of the planet. Unfortunately, the idea that we humans are suspended in gravity and orbiting the sun on a spaceship, Spaceship Earth, does not take hold at all in our consciousness.”
Virgin Galactic flights reach up to 50 miles above the Earth’s surface, a distance that both the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the United States Air Force (USAF) recognize as the frontier of outer space. This height is less than Karman lineIt is the internationally recognized boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, which lies about 62 miles above Earth.
A carrier plane, named VMS Eve (after Branson’s mother), will lift off the Delta Class spaceship to about 45,000 feet, then launch it for its journey into space. The spaceship will then return to Earth on its own.