Virgin Galactic and the Future of Commercial Spaceflight

Published: Tue May 24th, 2005
Source: www.space.com



Since the successful flights of SpaceShipOne last fall, a number of new space tourism ventures have been announced, all promising to provide prospective customers with a suborbital spaceflight experience. The most recent example was announced last week with the formation of Planetspace, a venture using technology developed by one of the former X Prize competitors, Canadian Arrow, with funding proffered by former MirCorp investor Chirinjeev Kathuria. All seek to tap the interest in suborbital space tourism ignited, in part, by the SpaceShipOne flights—even if some of these new ventures are a little sketchy on technical and financial details.

The one space tourism venture that has garnered the most interest in recent months, however, has been Virgin Galactic. Days before the first Ansari X Prize flight, Virgin announced it was partnering with Scaled Composites and Mojave Aerospace Ventures—the joint venture of Scaled and financier Paul Allen—to create a suborbital space tourism business flying vehicles based upon SpaceShipOne. Since then the company has released few details about its plans: the news section of Virgin Galactic’s web site was last updated on October 4, when SpaceShipOne made its final, prize-winning flight.
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