Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, is a British-American spaceflight company focused on providing suborbital spaceflights to space tourists and researchers. As the world's first commercial spaceline, it develops and operates its own reusable spaceflight systems, including the SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo. While the company is shifting its focus to Delta class vehicles for commercial service in 2026, its current partners include Redwire for manufacturing research payload lockers and it operates from Spaceport America in New Mexico.
All verified mentions of this organization in source documents.
Virgin Galactic awarded large company-issued wings to the four people in the cabin on the 2021-07-11 SpaceShipTwo flight.
The FAA awarded commercial astronaut wings again in 2019 to Mark Stucky and CJ Sturckow for flying Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo beyond 80.5 km in December 2018.
Virgin Galactic designated the 2021-07-11 flight as the Unity 22 mission.
Richard Branson announced plans for Virgin Galactic in September 2004 and agreed to license technology from Scaled Composites for a SpaceShipOne-derived vehicle.
Virgin Galactic completed electronic modifications to VSS Unity and successfully tested them on the 2021-05-22 flight.
Virgin Galactic had previously conducted three fully crewed test missions to the Karman line.
Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, performed a plant experiment from the University of Florida on Unity 22 through NASA’s Flight Opportunities program to evaluate human-tended research.
Virgin Galactic plans to perform two more test flights, including one for the Italian Air Force, before entering a maintenance period that will begin last fall and extend to early 2022.
Virgin Galactic upgraded VSS Unity’s horizontal stabilizer after the February 2019 flight damaged that component.
Virgin Galactic partnered with Omaze to raffle two seats on one of the first commercial SpaceShipTwo flights in early 2022.
The flight was conducted by Virgin Galactic with the VMS Eve carrier plane and the VSS Unity 22 space plane.
Virgin Galactic expects to perform two more SpaceShipTwo flights in 2021, including one revenue-generating flight for the Italian Air Force.
Virgin Galactic announced on 2021-06-25 that the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation updated its existing launch license for SpaceShipTwo to allow the company to fly spaceflight participants in addition to crew.
Virgin Galactic completed an extensive review of data gathered from its 2021-05-22 test flight and confirmed the flight performed well against all flight objectives.
VSS Unity’s upgraded horizontal stabilizers and flight controls provide finer pilot control and will be deployed in future spaceships in Virgin Galactic’s fleet.
Virgin Galactic plans three test flights through this fall that include one flight with four Virgin Galactic employees in the cabin to test its features.
Virgin Galactic flew its SpaceShipTwo vehicle VSS Unity on 2021-05-22 to an altitude of 89.2 km with two pilots aboard and landed back at Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Parabolic Arc published that Virgin Galactic is considering having founder Richard Branson fly on its next SpaceShipTwo flight, with that flight potentially taking place around 2021-07-04.
As of 2021-06-08, Virgin Galactic had not determined the date of its next SpaceShipTwo flight and neither confirmed nor denied that Richard Branson would be on that flight.
Virgin Galactic halted ticket sales after the October 2014 test flight crash of SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise and plans to reopen ticket sales after the flight that includes company founder Richard Branson.