Space tourism company Virgin Galactic has returned to space after a nearly two-year hiatus. The test flight, with four Virgin Galactic employees as passengers, was ‘successful’, the company said.
Space tourism company Virgin Galactic has returned to space after a nearly two-year hiatus. The test flight, with four Virgin Galactic employees as passengers, was “successful,” the company, founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, said on Thursday. “The ‘Unity 25’ mission has been a fantastic achievement for everyone at Virgin Galactic,” said CEO Michael Colglazier. The company is aiming for its first commercial flight by the end of June.
Branson personally took part in Virgin Galactic’s last flight into space in July 2021. After that, the company took a break to improve the technique. The interruption lasted significantly longer than originally planned.
On Virgin Galactic’s flights, a carrier aircraft named VMS Eve lifts off from a conventional runway in the US state of New Mexico and takes the VSS Unity spacecraft, which looks like a large private jet, to an altitude of more than 13 kilometers.
From there, the spacecraft, controlled by two pilots, flies with the help of its own engine to an altitude of more than 80 kilometers, where, according to the definition of the US Army, space begins. After several minutes of weightlessness, the VSS Unity then returns to earth in gliding flight. Thursday’s flight was Virgin Galactic’s fifth to reach space.
Virgin Galactic’s space tourism program has been repeatedly delayed, particularly after an accident in 2014 that killed a pilot. Since 2005, the company has pre-sold around 800 tickets for trips into space. The prices for a flight were between 200,000 and 450,000 US dollars (around 185,000 to 418,000 euros). The first commercial flight, named Galactic 01, is scheduled to take off at the end of June with Italian Air Force passengers.
Virgin Galactic competes with Blue Origin, the company owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, which has already sent 32 people into space on short suborbital flights. Since an accident in September 2022, his rocket has also remained on the ground. Blue Origin announced in March that it would resume space travel “soon”.