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Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. is a British-American spaceflight company founded by Richard Branson and the Virgin Group conglomerate which retains an 11.9% stake through Virgin Investments Limited. It is headquartered in California, and operates from New Mexico.
- Overview
- When will Virgin Galactic start space tourism and how much will it cost?
- Who owns Virgin Galactic and where is it based?
- What are Virgin Galactic's long-term goals?
- Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity supersonic suborbital spaceplane
- The test program so far
- What will Virgin Galactic space tourists experience?
- The trip to space and back
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By Jamie Carter
published 5 June 2019
The world’s first spaceliner?
Is Virgin Galactic almost ready to begin space tourism? (Image credit: Virgin Galactic)
Who needs an airline when you can have a spaceline? Aiming to become the first regular commercial spaceliner, Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson first promised to take people to space in 2004, and most years since has predicted that his ‘spaceliner of the future’ was on the cusp of beginning service.
Branson says he expects to fly on the company’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle in 2019, possibly on July 16 to mark 2019's 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch. About 600 'future astronauts' are signed up and have each put down a $20,000 (about £15,000, AU$30,000) deposit, though the final cost of tickets is $250,000 (about £190,000, AU$360,00...
Virgin Galactic is part of the Virgin Group, which is owned by British billionaire entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson. The Virgin Group also includes the likes of Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Holidays, Virgin Radio, Virgin Rail, Virgin Money and Virgin Mobile, as well as Virgin Hyperloop One, which is trying to build an ultra-high-speed ‘people pipeline’.
Virgin Galactic has two sister companies, Virgin Orbit (which launches small satellites from a Boeing 747) and The SpaceShip Company, which builds and tests the VSS Unity. A major investor in all three was supposed to be Saudi Arabia at US$1 billion, but that was cancelled by Branson after the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in October 2018.
An incredibly ambitious man and expert self-publicist, Branson is less gung-ho about space than Elon Musk at SpaceX and Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin.
"Your lives will be transformed by space," he wrote in a video-letter to his grandchildren after SpaceShipTwo made it to space for the first time in December 2018. "It will give your generation the planetary perspective on which the future of humanity rests, that we're all in this together on spaceship Earth."
Branson believes that as many people as possible need to see the curvature of the Earth from space to get a taste of the powerful 'overview effect' that many astronauts report feeling after coming back from space. If we all see Earth from space, we are all soon realise how irrelevant national boundaries and cultural differences are.
That's a pretty different perspective to that of Musk and Bezos, who both want to go much further than the edge of the Earth's atmosphere.
Virgin Galactic is very serious about space tourism. Its VSS Unity spaceplane is a supersonic vehicle designed and built by sister company The Spaceship Company. It's based on Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne, the first manned private rocket to reach space, in 2004 (VSS Unity and its forbear VSS Enterprise were formerly called SpaceShipTwo).
It has two seats for the pilots and six for passengers, but how it gets to space is unusual. It gets part of the way to space while attached to the undercarriage of a custom-made carrier aircraft called VMS Eve (formerly called WhiteKnightTwo) before it detaches and launches itself into space.
VSS Unity has successfully been to space twice. It first did so in December 2018 when pilots Mark Stucky and CJ Sturckow (plus some NASA payloads and a mannequin called Annie) reached 51.4 miles.
In February 2019 it reached space for the second time. It was VSS Unity's fifth rocket-powered flight test flight, and onboard this time were three people; pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, plus Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic’s Chief Astronaut Instructor.
'Astronaut wings' go to anyone who reaches 50 miles, though since the Kármán line at 62 miles up is generally accepted to be where space begins, that’s probably where Virgin Galactic is ultimately aiming to reach.
However, the test program hasn't been without problems. There have been two dramatic setbacks that have cost four lives, most recently co-pilot Michael Alsbury during an accident in October 2014.
Supersonic speeds, weightlessness, a view of the curvature of Earth, then more supersonic speeds. However, it's all pretty different from what Blue Origin is on the cusp of offering with its vertical take-off New Shepherd suborbital rocket. Six Virgin Galactic customers will arrive at Spaceport New Mexico four days before the scheduled flight for m...
On the fourth day, after getting strapped into their reclining seats in VSS Unity, the mothership VMS Eve will take-off on a runway and climb to 50,000 feet Now comes the fun bit; VSS Unity detaches and fires its rocket-powered engines for 63 seconds, surging towards space at three-and-a-half times the speed of sound.
That in itself will be an incredible experience for any ‘space tourist’, but it's also followed by four minutes of weightlessness, and a chance to see the Earth from space, before a descent at three times the speed of sound. That will be some rush. Finally, the VSS Unity will land back on the runway at Spaceport New Mexico, 1.5-2 hours after it took off.
A four-day commitment and a 2.5-hour ride make Virgin Galactic's space tourism experience far longer than the 11 minutes Blue Origin could soon offer. Is Virgin Galactic worth the $250,000? It looks like a bargain to us.
•Blue Origin: everything you need to know
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Mar 1, 2024 · Advertisement. Colglazier said the first of Virgin Galactic's Delta ships is on track to begin ground and flight testing next year, with commercial service targeted for 2026 based out of...
Jul 9, 2021 · Branson’s Virgin Galactic flies above 80 kilometers (or about 262,000 feet), which is the altitude the U.S. recognizes as the boundary of space, while Bezos’ Blue Origin flies above 100 ...
Dec 21, 2021 · Spaceport America opened in October 2010 and is currently Galactic's only location. However, the company previously announced plans for a facility in the California desert and has expressed interest in opening a European hub at Spaceport Sweden or Scotland's Royal Air Force Lossiemouth station.
Jul 11, 2021 · For more than 15 years, Virgin Galactic has been working to begin carrying paying passengers to the edge of space and back. Here, we track the long, winding road to realising Sir Richard...
Aug 11, 2023 · TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. (AP) — Virgin Galactic rocketed to the edge of space with its first tourists Thursday, a former British Olympian who bought his ticket 18 years ago and a mother-daughter duo from the Caribbean. The space plane glided back to a runway landing at Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, after a brief flight that ...
