Since then, the company has been largely quiet, making this week\u2019s revelation of new hardware notable. So Virgin Galactic is still pressing ahead, but the question is where it\u2019s going, and along with it, the entire suborbital space tourism industry.<\/p>\n
Difficult to make a profit<\/h2>\n
Spaceflight remains an expensive and dangerous business, even for companies focused on relatively simple suborbital flights.<\/p>\n
There was a time, about five years ago, when the market appeared poised to break through. During the summer of 2021, both Virgin Galactic and its US-based competitor, Blue Origin, began commercial flights. Famously, Branson and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos both went to space within weeks of one another.<\/p>\n
Both companies have had robust demand for their services.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
A full-priced ticket on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket never dropped below $1 million, and the company had customers lined up. But then, during an uncrewed New Shepard flight in September 2022, the rocket failed. The vehicle had to stand down for more than a year. Blue Origin has never revealed New Shepard\u2019s finances, but multiple sources told Ars the program\u2014despite persistent demand\u2014was never close to profitability. Blue Origin ended New Shepard in January to focus on orbital launches and its lunar program.<\/p>\n
That left Virgin Galactic as the sole player in the suborbital space tourism game. The company has plenty of customers and has been able to raise its prices for \u201cspaceflight expeditions\u201d to $750,000. Nevertheless, without a steady stream of revenue from flights, its finances are strained.<\/p>\n Sir Richard Branson enjoys microgravity in 2021.<\/p>\n Credit: Two years ago, in February 2024, Virgin Galactic\u2019s \u201ccash position\u201d was reported as strong, with $982 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. A year later, this cash position had declined to $567 million, as the company has very low revenues while it\u2019s not flying. To that end, Virgin Galactic said a first spaceflight with the new spaceship carrying research payloads was coming in summer 2026, with private astronaut flights in \u201cfall 2026.\u201d<\/p>\n At the end of March, the company reported its most recent quarterly results, with its cash position declining to $338 million. The company was now projecting that its new spaceship would \u201center service\u201d between \u201clate Q4 2026 and early Q1 2027.\u201d<\/p>\n The new ship revealed this week will presumably make that first flight. According to Virgin Galactic, it was being moved this week from the assembly hangar to the launch hangar and will now \u201cundergo final systems integration and ground testing.\u201d<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n It\u2019s difficult to tell from an image, but the vehicle appears to have a significant amount of integration left to undergo, and its test campaign will not be short.<\/p>\n For comparison purposes, Virgin Galactic rolled a fully integrated VSS Unity<\/em> spacecraft out in February 2016. It underwent about six months of ground tests and two years of glide and flight tests before its first spaceflight in December 2018. If we assume Virgin Galactic can halve the test time with its new spaceship, given the integration work necessary, this would still place its first spaceflight at the end of 2027 or early 2028.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear whether Virgin Galactic has the cash reserves to fund a prolonged test phase, let alone invest in multiple spaceships to achieve profitability. Ultimately, this will require the company to fly hundreds of passenger flights a year.<\/p>\n The stock market appears to have similar concerns. At the height of the meme stock era, as Virgin Galactic was sending Branson into space, the company\u2019s publicly traded stock rocketed to a valuation of $1,118 per share. It has steadily fallen since, trading at between $2 and $3 a share this year.<\/p>\n The odds of Virgin Galactic succeeding appear to be pretty long. First, it must get this newest spaceship flying soon, and it must do so safely. Then it must build a second one and hope that its aging Eve<\/em> carrier aircraft can support three spaceflights a week and 125 flights a year. And it must perform all of these operations without significant anomalies. If it does all of this before the cash runs out, Virgin Galactic will just about be able to break even.<\/p>\n And if it doesn\u2019t? Then the suborbital space tourism market, which looked so promising just a few years ago, will likely be dead for at least a generation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Thursday, the publicly traded spaceflight company Virgin Galactic shared on social media a new photo of its next-generation spaceship being towed outside of its factory in Mesa, Arizona. You remember Virgin Galactic, right? The space tourism company was founded 22 years ago by Sir Richard Branson to bring spaceflight to the masses. Hundreds of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44001,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[509,21,9485,492],"class_list":["post-44000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-blue-origin","tag-space","tag-suborbital-space-tourism","tag-virgin-galactic"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44000"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Images](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Richard-Branson-at-zero-g-640x360.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Virgin Galactic<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nA lot of testing ahead<\/h2>\n