The waiting list is long, the expectations high, and the prices even more so. But Richard Branson’s dream of launching regular commercial flights into space is inching ever closer to fruition, after Virgin Galactic announced it is set to ramp up production of its latest spacecraft.
Work will begin on the company’s Delta SpaceShip at a facility in Phoenix, Arizona next month, with test flights predicted to take place in spring 2026 before the first public trips get underway next summer.
The new vehicles will be designed to accommodate six paying passengers, two more than the previous spacecraft, which last flew in June 2024 – a hiatus that has created a backlog of 700 paying passengers for the flights.
Founded in 2004, Virgin Galactic’s marketing blurb proudly announces that the company is ‘launching a new space age, where all are invited along for the ride’.
Reaching for the stars comes at a price, however, with tickets for the space excursions, which will blast off from Spaceport America in New Mexico, expected to come in at $600,000 (£477,000) each.
Despite that hefty price tag, executives at Virgin Galactic, which has previously stated that it hopes to construct up to half a dozen Delta-class ships annually, have expressed confidence that the backlog of customers will be cleared within a year once operations resume.
‘The production and launch timeline for the new ships remains on track, with our first commercial research spaceflight expected in the summer of 2026, and the first private astronaut spaceflight in the fall of 2026,’ said Michael Colglazier, the company’s chief executive.
Work will begin on Virgin Galactic’s Delta SpaceShip at a facility in Phoenix, Arizona next month amid expectations that the first public suborbital trips will begin next summer
British tycoon Richard Branson has been dreaming of launching regular commercial flights into space since 2004, when he founded Virgin Galactic, but the venture has been beset by issues
The Gaia lounge at Gateway to Space, the facility at Spaceport America in New Mexico from which the space flights will blast off next year if all goes as planned
Virgin Galactic’s facility at Spaceport America in New Mexico. The ‘production and launch timeline’ for the firm’s new spacecraft is on track, according to its CEO Michael Colglazier
‘We are able to be more specific with projecting our timelines because we now have line of sight to the delivery dates of each and every tool and part that supports assembly.’
Mike Moses, president of Virgin Galactic’s spaceline activities, said the testing process would be expedited by the fact that the Delta will be developed from an earlier model, the VSS Unity, which first flew tourists into space in August 2023.
‘Unity required moving in small, incremental steps to build up knowledge about the spaceship’s performance and limits,’ said Moses.
‘The test flights of Delta will be much more like regression testing, where we are incrementally expanding how Delta flies, but doing so by comparing it to how we know Unity flew.’
The company hopes to run two flights a week by early 2027 – two decades later than originally hoped – as it seeks to boost its coffers following a history of false starts.
Most notable among those were the explosion that killed three workers during testing of a rocket propulsion system in 2007 and the crash of a spacecraft during a test flight in 2014 in which a pilot died.
Such setbacks have not deterred other wealthy entrepreneurs from pursuing space tourism ambitions, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the Tesla and Spacex supremo Elon Musk.
Musk has seen encouraging results from test flights of his Starship, the biggest and most powerful spacecraft ever produced, but Blue Origin, the rocket company Bezos founded in 2000, is reportedly set to cut about 1,400 jobs as it seeks to make up ground on its rivals.
