Prospective space tourists could be waiting a while yet for take-off due to a spaceship assembly delay announced by the only remaining player in the market, Virgin Galactic. The firm’s latest Delta-class spacecraft is now not expected to be ready for its debut flight until early 2027.
Virgin Galactic has so far sold over 50 tickets at $750,000 each for future suborbital tourist flights, taking over $50 million in bookings since March 2026 alone, the firm’s CEO, Michael Colglazier, told an earnings call.
However, Colglazier said issues on the production line involving “hundreds of relatively small but important installation tasks” have pushed back testing and mean that the 60-to-90-minute, six-passenger trips to suborbital space will now not take place until February 2027.
After that though, the flight schedule is expected to ramp up to 10 flights a month by the end of the second quarter of the same year, when a second spaceship is due to come online.
New Delta spacecraft
The two new Delta-class space vehicles will resemble the previous Unity iteration. The piloted craft will be carried to an altitude of around 15 km by a mothership before being released and using their own rocket engines to reach the edge of space. They will then return independently to Virgin Galactic’s hub, Spaceport America in New Mexico, where they will make an unpowered landing.
Despite the ongoing delays experienced by Virgin Galactic, the firm has so far flown at least 23 private passengers and tourists, out of a total of 32 people, into space on various crewed suborbital missions. However, operations aboard the VSS Unity spaceplane were suspended in 2024 to allow the company to focus on the higher-capacity Delta-class spacecraft.
The firm has been selling tickets in different priced tranches over time, with the latest price point per seat of $750,000 now sold out, Colglazier said, confirming that “we plan to open a new tranche of spaceflight expeditions this fall at higher price points.” In total, over 650 future astronauts currently hold reservations.
Virgin Galactic targets positive cash flow
Virgin Galactic lost nearly $56 million in the second quarter of 2026, but chief financial officer Doug Ahrens is forecasting positive quarterly cash flow by 2027, thanks to the Delta programme’s targeted rate of 10 flights a month, which he said would be an “unprecedented achievement in human spaceflight.”
Ahrens emphasised on the earnings call that “Each new spaceship has the potential to generate over $1.4 billion of lifetime contribution margin.” And since rival Blue Origin has grounded its own New Shepard programme for two years to allow the Bezos-owned firm to focus on its lunar ambitions, Virgin Galactic is, for the moment, the sole player left in the potentially lucrative space tourism market.
