Breakthrough in space tourism: Virgin Galactic prepares for launch

Sir Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004. Photo: JOE SKIPPER/REUTERS

A tiny silhouette of VSS falls out from under the mothership. Unity fell for a few seconds before its rocket engines kicked in, accelerating the spacecraft to three times the speed of sound.

After a few minutes, it was at the very edge of the earth's atmosphere. «We've reached space,» said Virgin Galactic, which developed the rocket.

May's successful test mission, Unity 25, which lifted six employees and crew 54 miles above the ground, caused less noise than Sir Richard Branson's last run was almost two years ago. The flight was not broadcast live or broadcast by Virgin, although space enthusiasts filmed the flight from the ground.

However, the launch was a crucial final test for the billionaire company as it finally returned to space. In 2021, a British entrepreneur made history by fulfilling his dream of flying into space aboard his company's spaceship, beating rival Jeff Bezos and his company Blue Origin in just days.

But that mission was followed by an investigation by US authorities after the missile was found to have veered slightly off course. The company has also spent the past 23 months making costly changes to how it operates and weathered its share price crash.

This week, as early as Tuesday, Virgin Galactic, barring any last-minute hitches, will launch commercial activity. space launches with the Galactic 01 mission, which CEO Michael Colglazier called «the next exciting chapter» for the company.Unity 25, which has completed its test mission with six employees and crew on board, will begin flying with tourists and scientists many miles above the ground. Photo: Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic will start flying tourists and scientists many miles above the ground, and its first launch will include a trio of Italian Air Force researchers.

Hundreds of potential «astronauts» have already agreed to pay $450,000 (£354,000) for the rare privilege of five minutes of weightlessness. The rockets will launch from the company's slick hangar, Spaceport America, in the New Mexico desert, just south of the town with the oddly named The Truth About Consequences.

Sir Richard, now 72, has had to wait a long time. The commercial rocket enterprise was created almost two decades after numerous failures, catastrophes and tragedies.

Success will banish memories of the failure of the billionaire's other space venture, Virgin Orbit, after it collapsed earlier this year. An independent satellite launcher, majority-owned by the Virgin Group, spent more than $1 billion commercializing its technology before it ran out of money and was sold for parts to competitors in a bankruptcy process.

According to Will Whitehorn, the company's former president, the birth of Virgin Galactic began when Sir Richard and Buzz Aldrin met in 1995 in Marrakech. By then, Sir Richard was already a corporate daredevil, having made several record-breaking high-altitude balloon flights.

This encounter inspired Sir Richard to seriously consider a space company using a reusable aircraft to fly at the edge of the atmosphere. “In the 1950s, the US was launching spaceplanes from under B-52s to X-15s,” Whitehorn says.

> Meeting Buzz Aldrin (top center) in 1995 inspired Sir Richard to start a space company. Photo: Philip Hollis

After the meeting, Sir Richard commissioned Whitehorn to give the concept a modern twist. Whitehorn thought it possible to build a «relatively cheap space plane» rather than using giant rockets. In 2004, Virgin Galactic was officially founded.

He didn't expect it to take so long. “Space is not easy,” says Whitethorn, who was Virgin Galactic's president until 2010.

“It's hard. They took more time and more money than I expected.”

Virgin Galactic is using a carrier vehicle, a twin-fuselage aircraft called the White Knight 2, to carry a rocket-powered space plane to high altitude. Then this plane separates and explodes in the upper atmosphere.

But the company ran into a number of technical issues with its system, resulting in lengthy delays. He also faced disaster in 2014 when his VSS Enterprise car, built by contractor Scaled Composites, crashed. Virgin co-test pilot Michael Alsbury was killed in the accident.

The official report attributed the accident to an error by the Allsbury pilot, who, due to extreme stress, turned the ship's tail fins too early when it was accelerating quickly, resulting in a breakdown at high altitude. It was also due to a poor design choice by Scaled Composites, which failed to mitigate such a mistake.

Despite the tragedy, Sir Richard was able to take Virgin Galactic to a public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. in 2019 by merging it with a takeover company run by Silicon Valley investor Chamath Palihapitiya.

At some point in mid-2021, the company was valued at about $4 billion. Subsequently, Sir Richard sold more than $1 billion worth of shares in the company.

But since the placement, there have been new setbacks. In 2021, a book about the company, Gods of Testing: Virgin Galactic and the Making of the Modern Astronaut, reported that a test flight conducted two years earlier had resulted in severe damage.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is working on his own travel venture called Blue Origin. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images North America

In his speech, Sir Richard called the experience «the complete experience of a lifetime.»

With a price tag of $450,000 per seat, Christensen notes that the potential earnings from flying Virgin Galactic is «pretty modest» compared to up to multi-million dollar satellite launchers.

Sir Richard's rival, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is working on his own travel venture. Blue Origin flew a total of six missions with a travel team on board, including Bezos himself. It uses a more conventional rocket, has lucrative satellite contract designs, and is part of NASA's plans for a mission to the moon.

Virgin Galactic said it would launch one mission a month to start. But for this you will need to speed up. “To recoup the cost, it seems like you need to have a reasonable launch rate,” Christensen says.

The company is working on a new variant of its space plane, dubbed the Delta, which aims to increase the number of launches to one per week by 2026.

Despite the odds, Whitethorn, former president of Virgin Galactic, says he'd love to fly Unity, even though he doesn't have a ticket yet. “I hope to become one [passenger] myself.”

“The economics of space travel has changed,” he adds. “This is the industrialization of space. Space tourism will be a small part of this, helping to push technology forward.”