This summer, Virgin Galactic will finally start flying paying customers to the farthest reaches of space with its rocket-powered SpaceShipTwo. The first flight, the mission dubbed Galactic 01, is scheduled to launch as early as June 27.
If galaxy 01 rises to the end of the universe as expected, it will take many years, nearly 20 years. Billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson, first announced his entry into the space tourism industry in 2004 and set a goal of carrying passengers in 2007, but delays and flights A fatal accident in the middle slowed progress. Branson flew SpaceShipTwo in July 2021, but Virgin Galactic has yet to fly commercially.
This summer’s flight is poised to change that.the company is finally ready A cordon would be opened in front of a line of over 800 customers who paid between $250,000 and $450,000 per bottle. But it may be too late to make Virgin Galactic a sustainable player in the space tourism game.
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“We don’t have high hopes for long-term stability from Virgin Galactic because of its excruciatingly slow start-up pace, high company costs, and strong safety track record. Because it’s mixed,” says Laura Folchick, a space industry analyst and founder of the consulting firm. Astralytical company. “Unless there are major changes in operations, I don’t think the revenue will catch up with the expenditure.”
Virgin Galactic was founded under the light of optimism cast by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites. Rutan and his Scaled Composites designed and built a suborbital spaceplane called SpaceShipOne, and in 2004 he made his second successful spaceflight within two weeks, Ansari X Award $10 million. Later that year, Branson worked with Rutan to develop Spaceship 2, and Virgin His Galactic was born.
Like SpaceShipOne, Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo is a rocket-powered spacecraft. Carried by a large aircraft called White Knight Two, the spaceplane detached at an altitude of 49,000 feet and the rocket ignited, powering the plane to just over 80 miles above what the U.S. government considers the boundary of outer space. do. SpaceShipTwo then glides back to Earth using an innovative “feathering” system. The system rotates the spaceplane’s twin tails upward and forward of the aircraft, using aerodynamic drag to slow the aircraft during re-entry.
But relying on its innovative technology as the key to opening up the space tourism market may have put Virgin Galactic at a significant disadvantage. “They had far more technical problems than they expected with this immature technology and had serious safety concerns,” says Folczyk. “Conventional rockets have a long history of launching manned as well as unmanned space flights. Spaceplanes have no such history.”
These safety concerns arose on October 31, 2014 when the SpaceShipTwo spacecraft, dubbed VSS Enterprise, exploded during flight over the Mojave Desert, killing one of the two test pilots on board. In a tragic way, it became the front line. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that one of the pilots deployed the feathering system too early during a test flight, causing the plane to crash.
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Unlike traditional rockets, spaceplanes can’t be tested without a human crew on board, increasing risk during development, Folchick said. That may have slowed Virgin Galactic relative to competitors such as Blue Origin, which use conventional rockets and space capsules for tourism. Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos reached space on his own New Shepard rocket in 2021, the same month as Branson’s spaceplane flight, and has carried dozens of paying customers since. continue to fly.
“They absolutely had competitors who took advantage of the fact that they said they would be online but they weren’t,” says Forcyzk.
After stumbling in the starting blocks, can Virgin Galactic catch up in the space tourism race? He has two duties. The company needs to raise money, and “to raise money, you have to prove it’s safe, you have to prove it’s operational,” Folchik said. “So I don’t know what this summer will bring, but I believe we should expect more delays. I hope to see more flights.”
We also need to prove that those flights are safe. “Their whole business case hinges on public perception of people wanting to fly in their vehicles for fun or research,” says Forsaik. “Unlike their competitors, they don’t have another place to do business.”
Virgin Galactic is, in many ways, a space company set up for 2004, the pre-iPhone era, not 2023. The company can carry space tourists and researchers, but it cannot carry cargo off Earth. Unlike Blue Origin, which is also building a lunar lander for NASA, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which launches satellites and astronauts for NASA and the Pentagon, Virgin Galactic’s hopes are It is entrusted only to its one spacecraft and the tourists who want to ride it. .
