Virgin Galactic will kick off its space tourism by bringing private civilians close to Earth's orbit in the company's second commercial space flight.
The flight launch is scheduled for Thursday morning and is the much-anticipated milestone in the company's founder Richard Branson's mission to build a "spaceline for Earth." The commercial space flight will launch from a New Mexico spaceport and culminate nearly two decades of technological development and effort.
Virgin Galactic's Second Commercial Space Flight
The company will use the launch to finally begin the clearance of a backlog of roughly 800 ticket holders who have been eagerly waiting for their chance to experience space. Virgin Galactic is competing with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company in efforts to sell trips to avid space fans, as per Bloomberg.
The flight will have three of its passengers having a different background than astronauts' typical background and the training they undergo. Virgin Galactic plans to hold commercial space flights every month after the latest expedition, which would usher in a new era of space travel.
The civilian passengers onboard the launch, Galactor 02, were identified as Keisha Schahaff, Anastatia Mayers, and Jon Goodwin. The first two are a mother and daughter hailing from the Caribbean and are the winners in a ticket raffle. The third is an 80-year-old former Olympian athlete.
The space company's latest endeavor comes after completing its first spaceflight in June. The passengers included people from the Italian Air Force and National Research Council on that particular flight.
Space tourism is expected to generate a massive profit for the company established in 2004. In Virgin Galactic's second-quarter earnings report, officials attributed an increase in quarterly revenue from $0.4 in 2022 to $2 million this year to "commercial spaceflight and membership fees related to future astronauts."
The Future of Space Tourism
The tickets to one of Virgin Galactic's space flights could cost customers up to $450,000, but some people like Goodwin, who bought his ticket more than a decade ago, only spent $250,000. According to Business Insider, the interstellar price of the trip is seen as the major factor in driving many people away from the opportunity.
The company's 2022 annual report showed that as of the end of last year, only about 800 tickets for commercial space flights had been reserved. These tickets will be turned into roughly $207 million in future revenue.
In the stiff competition for the market, Bezos' Blue Origin in July 2021 sent four people, which included the company's founder himself, 62 miles above our planet's surface. It marked the first passenger spaceflight completed by the space company, founded in 2000.
The passengers of Virgin Galactic will be traveling aboard the VSS Unity plane, which is being carried 50,000 feet upwards by another aircraft, the VMS Eve. At that particular altitude, Eve will release Unity, which would then fire up its rocket to blast itself to roughly 282,000 feet, only about nine miles short of the Karman line, the point widely regarded as the beginning of space, said Digital Trends.
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