Almost two years since Virgin Galactic’s last space flight, the company will once again take ordinary citizens into space – ordinary citizens with an extra $ 750,000, that is. It began accepting reservations online on Monday, with a much higher price than the $600,000 it charged for the 2023 trip.
The next trip will be made on the company’s new Delta Class ship, which can carry 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 first flights will be for research to gather information about how the ship works, and passenger flights will begin 6 to 8 weeks after that research trip, the company said.
If all goes as planned, the first non-research passengers could fly into space before the end of the year, the company said.
The company will sell 50 tickets for $750,000 each, then pause sales after they are all sold. The company will “increase our prices as we go” when sales resume, CEO Michael Colglazier said during the company’s earnings call earlier this week. He said they are not sure about future ticket prices.
A representative for Virgin Galactic told CNET that the company would not disclose how many of those 50 tickets have been sold so far or who the customers are.
Many people are waiting
Virgin Galactic will not only take new customers to space. There is a backlog of 675 people, whom the company calls “foundation astronauts” or “future astronauts” — people who paid deposits a decade ago for future flights. Because they paid years ago, the cost of their trip will be much lower than that of people buying tickets now.
Future flights could involve both new customers and those of established astronauts in that backlog.
Virgin Galactic’s goal, Colglazier said, is to make 10 trips a month by 2027. That would be about 60 passengers per month.
A lot of money has been invested in space tourism, albeit by a few companies, since engineer and businessman Dennis Tito became the first “space tourist” in 2001. Virgin Galactic has taken 23 customers into space, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has 98 flights, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX has taken 20. on the International Space Station.
The space tourism market is forecast to grow from $2.3 billion in 2026 to $47 billion in 2034, an annual increase of 45%, “recreation, exploration, and experiential travel beyond Earth’s atmosphere,” according to research firm Fortune Business Insights.
Virgin Galactic’s news comes on the same day that NASA will launch its first manned mission to the moon since 1972. Four astronauts — Reid 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 provides live updates and live streaming of the launch.
Virgin Galactic’s last flight was Galactic 07 on June 8, 2024, on VSS Unity, its first craft. That was the last flight of the 12-flight mission before the company began to set its sights on developing its Delta Class fleet for long-haul customer trips. Billionaire Richard Branson, who founded the company in 2004, took his first flight on July 11, 2021.
‘Incredibly thin blue line’
Ron Rosano, from San Rafael, California, fulfilled a lifelong dream with his Virgin Galactic voyage in 2023. He remembers his three minutes of weightlessness and the g-forces from firing the ship’s rockets.
Rosano told CNET that he remembers “the vision of this wonderful, miraculous planet floating in the black void, seeing the eerie blue line at the edge of our planet. Sadly, the idea that we humans are suspended in a gravitational field orbiting the sun in space, a spaceship, our spaceship consciousness, is completely invisible.”
Virgin Galactic’s flights reach as high as 50 miles above Earth, a distance recognized by both the FAA and the USAF as the limit of outer space. That altitude is below the Kármán line, the universally recognized boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, which is about 62 kilometers above Earth.
A cargo plane named VMS Eve (after Branson’s mother) will lift off, bring the Delta Class spacecraft to about 45,000 feet, and then release it on its journey into space. The spacecraft will then return to Earth on its own.
