Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Virgin Galactic delays commercial launch of space tourism service

By
Add as a preferred source on Google

Virgin Galactic has delayed the commercial launch of its suborbital space tourism service due to “escalating supply chain and labor constraints.”

The company said that rather than launching the service toward the end of this year as it had planned, it now expects to put the first paying passengers aboard its rocket-powered spaceplane in the first quarter of 2023.

Recommended Videos

In a recently released statement, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said: “We are executing on our plans to scale the business by developing our future fleet, investing in digital manufacturing technologies, and building out our commercial strategy to deliver a consumer experience like no other.”

Colglazier added: “Against a backdrop of escalating supply chain and labor constraints, our teams are containing the majority of these issues to minimize impact on schedules. We look forward to returning to space in the fourth quarter and launching commercial service in the first quarter of next year.”

Speaking later about the supply chain issues, the CEO said that required high-performance metallics were seeing extended delivery times. As for hiring, the company is taking on more engineers, but they’re spreading their time across multiple projects that include its next-generation spaceplane, Imagine.

The sub-orbital space trip

Wealthy customers are required to hand over $450,000 for a 90-minute experience that will take them to the edge of space and back.

A video (below) released by Virgin Galactic earlier this year shows prospective customers exactly what they can expect for their money.

Virgin Galactic Spaceflight System

As the footage shows, the experience begins with the VSS Unity spaceplane being carried skyward by a larger carrier aircraft. When it reaches an altitude of 50,000 feet, the carrier aircraft releases Unity, whereupon it fires up its rocket engine to power it toward the Kármán line, the point 62 miles above Earth that’s widely regarded as where space begins.

The passengers can then leave their seats to experience several minutes of weightlessness while taking in the stunning views of Earth and beyond. Unity will then glide back to Earth for a runway landing.

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson last year participated in the first fully crewed test flight of the system, which started and finished at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is aiming to launch a similar space tourism service with its New Shepard rocket. Bezos flew on Blue Origin’s first crewed test flight last year, and the company has since performed three further crewed flights as it moves toward the official launch of a commercial service, though the company has yet to announce a date for when it will get underway.

Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Topics
Starship is finally going orbital, and SpaceX has picked September 22
Flight 14 is aiming for orbit, Starlink V3 deployment and a very long day in space.
Starship rocket.

SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.

Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver

Read more
Want a city on the Moon? Scientists say there’s not enough water
A billion tons still comes up short
Artist impression of activities in a Moon Base.

For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.

A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.

Read more
NASA’s new telescope can see 100 times more sky than Hubble in a single shot
NASA just launched a $4 billion telescope to map billions of galaxies
NASA Roman Telescope Launch Featured

The Hubble telescope has an almost legendary status. Over the last three decades, Hubble gave us some of the most spectacular close-ups of the universe ever captured, and now, NASA’s newest space telescope wants to see the bigger picture. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30. Roman is now beginning a roughly three-month journey toward the Sun-Earth L2 point, nearly a million miles away, where it will spend its primary five-year mission surveying huge portions of the cosmos.

Roman carries a 2.4-meter primary mirror, the same diameter as Hubble’s, but its Wide Field Instrument can capture a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s. NASA expects it to use that combination of sharpness and scale to map billions of galaxies, study dark matter and dark energy, and discover enormous numbers of previously unknown worlds.

Read more