The launch window for Virgin Galactic’s sixth commercial spaceflight opens on 26 January 2024, according to a company press release.
Space tourists and crew
Four new space tourists will be taken to suborbital space by the flight, which will be Virgin Galactic’s 11th spaceflight to date. The tourists’ identities have not yet been revealed, but the roster does reveal that three private flyers, hailing from Texas, California, and Austria, will join one Ukrainian-Californian.
The latest flyers will number 23 through 26 of the private and government-sponsored “astronauts” Virgin Galactic has so far flown to below the 62-mile-high (100 kilometres) Kármán Line, or the internationally recognised “edge of space”.
As usual, VMS Eve, a carrier aircraft, will deploy the VSS Unity space plane at an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters). The Unity will be led by former U.S. marine and NASA astronaut C.J. Sturckow and former experimental and fighter pilot Nicola Pecile. Commander Mike “Sooch” Masucci, who flew the Unity last time, will pilot VMS Eve this time, alongside former fighter pilot Dan Alix.
Delta class roll out
After a wave of commercial flights in 2023 that the company has termed “unprecedented human spaceflight achievements”, it is predicted that Unity will cease operations at some point in 2024 while Virgin Galactic switches its attention to rolling out its new “Delta class” space plane – a development CEO Michael Colglazier has said could see the company flying two missions a week, though this timetable is unlikely to be acheived until 2026 after test flights are completed in 2025.
Bell Textron and Qarbon Aerospace are among the suppliers contracted for re-entry and control systems and fuselage and wing manufacture respectively.
Blue Origin competition
The timing for a pause in flights is unfortunate, just as competitor Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin New Shepherd is gearing up to recommence crewed commercial flights. The Amazon billionaire’s space project had been grounded for almost a year and a half after its emergency escape system fired unexpectedly in September 2022. Blue Origin had already flown 20 successful spaceflights, including six carrying humans.
Both companies have waiting lists numbering into the hundreds people, most of whom have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, lining up to experience spaceflight experiences lasting between 10 minutes and two and a half hours.
