Virgin Galactic’s sixth business spaceflight will lift off next month, if all goes in line with plan.
The mission, generally known as Galactic-06, is targeted for Jan. 26, Virgin Galactic announced in a press release issued on Tuesday (Dec. 19). The flight will include 4 private astronauts — one from Texas, one from California, one from Austria and one jointly from Ukraine and California, in line with the statement. Names of the participants weren’t released.
Virgin Galactic, which is a component of billionaire Richard Branson‘s Virgin Group of firms, takes tourists and personal astronauts to suborbital space using an air-launched system. That system consists of a carrier aircraft, VMS Eve, that deploys the VSS Unity space plane at an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters). On Galactic-06, Unity will probably be helmed by commander C.J. Sturckow and pilot Nicola Pecile, and Eve will probably be flown by commander Michael Masucci and pilot Dan Alix.
The corporate finished six spaceflights in as many months in 2023 following a two-year hiatus for hardware upgrades. A few of those flights catered to non-public tourists, while others also served governmental customers. For instance, Walter Villadei of the Italian Air Force commanded Italy’s Virtute-1 mission aboard a June 29 Virgin spaceflight, partially as training for his upcoming trip to the International Space Station on Axiom Space‘s Ax-3 mission, which is slated to lift off on Jan. 9.
Virgin Galactic is anticipated to ground its Unity space plane in 2024 after perhaps one or two more flights, company representatives have said. The corporate desires to concentrate on developing its next-generation “Delta class” space plane that might fly as often as twice every week once it’s ready, CEO Michael Colglazier said in a November earnings call, as reported by SpaceNews.
Test flights of Delta vehicles are expected to start in 2025, with full operational service commencing in 2026. The Virgin fleet, incidentally, doesn’t fly beyond the Kármán Line of 62 miles (100 kilometers), considered by international authorities to be the boundary of space. But U.S. entities use a special boundary, 50 miles (80 km), that Virgin breaches usually.
Virgin Galactic’s primary competitor within the suborbital tourism industry, the Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin, had a 15-month gap in flights after a September 2022 failure on an uncrewed mission of its Latest Shepard spacecraft, which is rated for each payloads and folks. Blue Origin returned to flight on Tuesday with an uncrewed Latest Shepard launch and plans to fly people again soon.