![A rocket launches.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Second_Spaceflight_Rocket_Motor_Burn-800x420.jpg)
On Monday, Virgin Galactic announced that it should conduct its next industrial spaceflight, Galactic 03, as early as September 8. This shall be the corporate’s third industrial spaceflight, and it should carry three as-yet-unnamed passengers who bought their tickets on the corporate’s space plane back within the early 2000s.
Should the flight occur in early September, it should mark the corporate’s fourth spaceflight in 4 months, a powerful cadence after a reasonably long downtime. Such a flight would also cement Virgin Galactic’s leadership within the suborbital space tourism race with Blue Origin, which has been grounded for nearly a yr after a launch accident with its Recent Shepard System nearly a yr ago.
To grasp why there was such an extended downtime after Sir Richard Branson’s flight on Virgin Galactic in 2021 and to find out how the corporate has reached a monthly flight cadence, I recently had an extended interview with Mike Moses, the corporate’s chief of operations and president. Moses got here to Virgin Galactic in 2011 from NASA, where he worked as a flight director after which as a senior leader of the Space Shuttle program.
![Mike Moses came to Virgin Galactic in 2011 from NASA.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Virgin_Galactic_Mike_Moses-300x298.jpg)
Virgin Galactic
On this interview, we discuss how long the corporate’s current spacecraft, , can keep flying, plans to introduce a brand new Delta-class family of spaceships, and why there probably will all the time be pilots on the controls of Virgin Galactic. This conversation has been edited calmly for clarity.
Ars:
Mike Moses: That is sort of it in a nutshell. It was an honor and a privilege to be there at the tip of the shuttle program and sort of lead that team through. Bittersweet to be closing it out, but we all know we finished strong, and every little thing went really, rather well. I used to be contemplating what was next.
I used to be probably going to move as much as headquarters with Gerst [NASA Associate Administrator Bill Gerstenmaier] and Bill Hill and work on what’s now Artemis. And after I checked out that—it was a great distance away, even back then, after they were being very optimistic with the pacings. I just desired to keep doing operations. I had a really big heart-to-heart conversation with Gerstenmaier, and he didn’t push me out the door, but he said, ‘Do not feel bad about leaving. You are going to do as much for industrial space as you’ll should you stayed here. Take these lessons and go.’ That was the little confidence boost I needed to make the switch into industrial space.
Ars:
Mike Moses: Back then, they were just preparing with Business Crew. They [commercial providers SpaceX and Orbital Sciences] hadn’t even flown cargo yet. In order that’s where the suborbital market was, and I assumed they’d probably be the primary ones to make it, before the orbital stuff. It seems that is not the best way it played out.
Anyway, I contemplated that and felt if I used to be gonna stick around and do orbital stuff, I might have probably stayed at NASA for it. This was a likelihood to come back try something that basically is about giving people experiences. In the federal government, that is not likely what you do, right? You are doing a service. So it was sort of a singular challenge for me. I feel I used to be the sixth worker within the operations team. We had a procurement person, a security person, and a medical person in, then me. I used to be going to assist construct it from scratch, and that was an enormous appeal to me.
Ars:
Mike Moses: One in all our challenges is the air launch capability. It’s an excellent advantage of our system, but we’ve to be very careful with it. We transition through numerous flight regimes. If you happen to give it some thought as an airplane, we separate away; we’re very heavy once we release from the Mothership. And we’re subsonic with a really back-heavy center of gravity once we light the motor. We’re principally like all rocket in that we’re half propellant.
Inside 60 seconds, we have lost half our weight, we transition supersonic, we go vertical, and now we’re on our tail. Then, once we come back down, you have got to interrupt the sound barrier. You are in a feathered configuration, and now you are a very light, forward center-of-gravity aircraft. To optimize the flight-control systems, to have the option to handle all of those regimes, you actually must get some flight test data in each of them after which put it together and optimize.