American company Virgin Galactic of billionaire Richard Branson in the framework of the quarterly report announced on the resumption of ticket sales to space tourists – the price starts from $ 450K for one seat on the VSS Unity rocket plane suborbital flights.
On July 11, Virgin Galactic completed a suborbital space flight with founder Richard Branson. This was the fourth test flight of VSS Unity and the first mission with a full crew of six. Branson and his crew (two pilots and three more passengers) in the Unity-22 spacecraft climbed to 86 kilometers, spent several minutes in zero gravity, admiring the Earth through numerous windows, and then successfully landed at Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Virgin Galactic is now planning two more test flights – a Unity-23 mission with Italian Air Force researchers scheduled for late September 2021, followed by a four-month “improvement period” (this is the “Life Extension Program” for the VMS Eve carrier aircraft) the third mission with a full crew of Unity-24 will take place with the company’s employees.
The move to commercial touring flight will mark the mission of Unity-25. It was originally scheduled for early 2022, but as part of a conference call with investors, it reported on the postponement to the third quarter of 2022. Corresponding FAA commercial suborbital tourism license issued Virgin Galactic back in June.
The price of a flight on a VSS Unity rocket plane, as mentioned above, is from $ 450 thousand per seat. But if you buy all the seats on the ship, you will have to pay a little extra on top. How much the entire flight will cost has not yet been specified. Virgin Galactic is now targeting 3-4 week repeat flights following the VMS Eve update. Now it is 7-8 weeks.
To date, more than 700 people have made an advance payment for the flight at the cost of 200-250 thousand dollars—Elon Musk and 82-year-old Wally Funk, who recently flew into space with Jeff Bezos on a rocket.
In the second quarter of 2021, Virgin Galactic generated $ 571,000 in revenue from R&D experiments aboard Unity 21 in May.
In March, Virgin Galactic unveiled a new spaceplane for the SpaceShip 3 project, dubbed the VSS Imagine. It has no significant technical differences from SpaceShipTwo but is expected to help further reduce the interval between flights. Also, Virgin Galactic will conduct “early research” for the construction of the next spaceport in 2022.
Virgin Galactic’s only competitor in suborbital space tourism is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which completed its first human suborbital flight on July 20. After the flight, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, who flew with his brother and the oldest and youngest astronauts, said his company had already received orders for $ 100 million in private flights, and the demand was “very, very high.”.