After last spaceship flight, Virgin Galactic looks to 2025 for more New Mexico testing - Albuquerque Business First
Virgin Galactic flights out of Spaceport America could resume in mid-2025 through next-generation spaceship testing. Virgin Galactic's spaceship, VSS Unity, successfully completed a commercial mission from New Mexico's Spaceport America on June 8. Following this, it could be around a year before another Virgin Galactic ship takes to New Mexico skies. This would be a different, "next-generation" spaceship that the company hopes can boost its profitability. The mission, "Galactic 07," carried four passengers, was Virgin Galactic's second with four passengers since January. The company's CEO, Michael Colglazier, has stated that around 10% of its first 1,000 flights are planned to be research missions. The Delta class ships are designed to fly "almost eight times faster" than Unity's once-per-month cadence, or two flights per week, and could be ready for commercial operations in 2026.
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Following a successful commercial mission on Saturday, it could be about a year before another Virgin Galactic ship takes to New Mexico skies — what would be a different, "next-generation" spaceship the company hopes can boost it to profitability.
Space tourism and testing company Virgin Galactic's stark white spaceship, VSS Unity, jetted through New Mexico skies Saturday morning. More than a hundred people, including company founder Sir Richard Branson, watched the flight from New Mexico's Spaceport America, where Unity took off — carried by Virgin's mothership VMS Eve — and where it landed just over an hour later.
If all goes according to plan, it could be about a year before another Virgin Galactic ship takes to New Mexico skies — what would be a different, "next-generation" spaceship the company hopes can boost it to profitability.
"Galactic 07," the callsign for the Virgin Galactic mission that launched from Spaceport America at around 8:30 a.m. on June 8, carried four passengers:
The hour-long flight was Virgin Galactic's second with four passengers following its January "Galactic 06" mission, at a per-seat cost of around $800,000.
Atasever flew Saturday with three "human-tendered experiments," the company said in a June 8 news release, including "custom headgear" for brain activity monitoring and two commercially available insulin pens "to examine the ability to administer accurate insulin doses in microgravity."
Spaceship Unity also carried a pair of autonomous payloads, one from Purdue University that studied "propellant slosh" and one from the University of California, Berkeley, that tested 3D printing technology. Both were supported by NASA's Flight Opportunities program, Virgin Galactic said.
Research missions are one part of Virgin Galactic's business strategy going forward. Company CEO Michael Colglazier has said around 10% of its first 1,000 flights are planned to be research missions.
In a press conference inside Virgin Galactic's "Gateway to Space" hangar at Spaceport America, Mike Moses, president of Virgin's spaceline operations, called the company's VSS Unity spaceship "revolutionary."
"While Unity accomplished amazing, amazing things there in the test program, it really took off and another chapter opened when we moved here to Spaceport America, and we brought the commercial human spaceflight to the Land of Enchantment," Moses said during the press conference.
Virgin's "Galactic 01" mission in June 2023 marked its first commercial spaceflight. It's since flown six more commercial missions out of the Spaceport, three of which — "Galactic 01," Saturday's "Galactic 07" and "Galactic 05" in early November — were research flights.
But Moses said Saturday that its next generation of spaceships, the "Delta class," currently under development, could be "even more revolutionary."
Virgin Galactic's Delta class ships are designed to fly "almost eight times faster" than Unity's once-per-month cadence, or two flights per week, Moses said Saturday. That could equate to around 750 passengers per year flying into space on board two Delta spaceships Virgin plans to have ready for commercial operations in 2026.
The company could start flight tests of its Delta ships out of Spaceport America in mid-2025, CEO Colglazier said on its third quarter 2023 earnings call in November and reiterated on its fourth quarter 2023 earnings call in February.
With more money expected to come in from flying more passengers more frequently, Virgin Galactic expects to reach positive cash flow in 2026, CEO Colglazier and CFO Doug Ahrens have estimated on previous earnings calls. Its Delta ships are being built to hold six passengers and generate as much as $3.6 million in revenue per flight.
Virgin said in early May it started operations at a ground testing facility in Irvine, California, ahead of planned flight testing next year. The company expects to start tooling up a facility in Mesa, Arizona, to assemble its Delta ships this summer; Bell Textron and Qarbon Aerospace are the company's sub-assembly suppliers for its Delta-class ships.
The company's flight pause and focus on readying its Delta-class ships for commercial service in 2026 are part of a "strategic realignment" enacted in November, CEO Colglazier said at the time. That realignment of resources included 185 layoffs, 73 of which were in New Mexico.
Scott McLaughlin, the executive director of the 18,000-acre Spaceport near Truth or Consequences, said shortly after that realignment redoing portions of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority's lease with Virgin Galactic — set to expire in 2023 — to include a per-flight revenue element, and managing what could become a more crowded airspace if Virgin begins flying two times per week, are ongoing considerations in New Mexico.
One of Virgin Galactic's space tourism competitors, Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, resumed its own spaceflight operations in mid-May with a six-person passenger crew. The Kent, Washington-based company's flight launched from a site in far West Texas.
Other spaceflight missions came early this month. SpaceX, the Elon Musk-owned launch company, launched successfully on June 6; Boeing sent a two-person NASA crew to the International Space Station on board its Starliner rocket the same day.
Virgin Galactic's stock price (NYSE: SPCE) opened Monday at $0.84, per MarketWatch. The company received notice from the New York Stock Exchange on May 29 it's no longer in compliance with the exchange's listing regulations because of its price per share being under $1 over a 30-day period; Virgin has six months after the notice to regain compliance.
Topik: Space