Virgin Galactic completes third commercial spaceflight

Virgin Galactic flew three paying passengers into suborbit Friday morning from Spaceport America in southern New Mexico, marking the VSS Unity spaceship’s third successful commercial spaceflight this summer.

The company launched commercial service in June, when it flew a three-member Italian crew to space on a research and training mission. Then, on Aug. 10, it rocketed three more people into suborbit — including a British citizen and two women from Barbados — kicking off the company’s long-awaited space tourism business following nearly 20 years of research and development.

Friday’s flight, dubbed “Galactic 3,” included two more British citizens — Timothy Nash of South Africa and Adrian Reynard of the United Kingdom — along with U.S. citizen Ken Baxter. All three bought their tickets years ago, dating back to 2005.

That makes them “founding members” of Virgin Galactic’s “Future Astronaut” community, which includes some 800 individuals from more than 60 countries who have made reservations to fly on the Unity, according to the company.

“What a thrilling day for our three new private astronauts and the entire team at Virgin Galactic,” CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement following Friday morning’s spaceflight. “It’s an honor to see our ‘Galactic 3’ crew realize their lifelong dreams of spaceflight as they inspire our manifest of Future Astronauts. Each successful flight shows how powerful and personally transformative space travel can be, and we look forward to scaling our operations and making space travel more accessible to people around the world.”

Under Virgin Galactic’s system, the six-passenger rocketship is attached to the wing of a mothership, VMS Eve, which carries Unity part way to space at about 45,000 feet. At that point, Unity breaks away from Eve and fires its rocket motor to shoot into space, where passengers can then float for a few minutes in microgravity and view the Earth below before the vehicle glides back down to the spaceport.

During the last two commercial flights, the company invited dozens of reporters to view the events onsite, and it livestreamed the spaceflights for online public viewing, providing real-time images of the Unity rocketing into space, and of passengers floating in the cabin and peering out the vehicle windows.

In contrast, Virgin Galactic did not invite reporters to Friday’s flight, and it declined to livestream the event, instead updating the public through chronological tweets on X (formerly Twitter) that detailed key intervals of the 90-minute spaceflight, such as when it took off, when the rocketship reached space, and when it landed back at the spaceport. It did include one seconds-long video clip of the passengers floating in microgravity, which was imbedded in the tweet that Virgin Galactic posted when Unity climbed into suborbit.

The move away from intense public coverage reflects the company’s transition into regularly monthly flights for “private astronauts” as Virgin Galactic starts working through its backlog of 800 paying customers. As it intensifies commercial operations, Virgin Galactic wants to now focus on the individual passenger experience for the customers themselves, respecting their privacy rather than mounting a public relations blitz for each flight, Colglazier said during an earnings conference call in August.

Broad public coverage of the first two commercial flights helped to showcase the company’s vehicles and service, the space system’s safety, and the unique experience it offers people, Colglazier told investors.

“As we move forward with flying our customers to space, the majority of our webcast will be for private viewing as we focus our efforts on customers and their guests,” Colglazier said. “…We want to find a balance. There will always be recaps and footage — but not necessarily detailed streaming of the interior cabin — because we’ll give that instead to our private astronauts.”

The company doesn’t want to “over-commercialize” the customer experience, Colglazier said.

Select future flights could well be livestreamed, such as when a celebrity boards the Unity, said Spaceport America Executive Director Scott McLaughlin. But it makes sense for Virgin Galactic to now focus first on their customers as it moves into regular commercial operations.

“There could be more public-facing events, such as when a well-known Hollywood star flies,” McLaughlin told the Journal. “But private passengers may want to just share their experience with friends and family.”

The company has now flown to space four times in four months, including an in-house Virgin Galactic crew that conducted a final, full-system evaluation in May before launching commercial service the following month. That puts the company on the monthly flight cadence it’s striving for with Eve and Unity until its next-generation Delta Class spaceships enter service in about three years, allowing Virgin Galactic to move to weekly flights and, eventually, daily ones.

The company said Friday that its next commercial flight will take place in early October.