Virgin Galactic completed its first commercial spaceflight of 2024 and penultimate planned flight out of Spaceport America this year on Friday morning, nearly three months after the space travel company laid off 73 people in New Mexico amid a major restructuring move.
The Friday flight, dubbed "Galactic 06," took off from Spaceport America at around 10:15 a.m. The company's spaceship, VSS Unity, touched back down at the Spaceport just after 11:30 a.m.
Unity carried four private astronauts during the flight, which included customers from Austria, California and Texas, as well as one customer who Virgin Galactic said hailed from both Ukraine and Nevada. It was Virgin's sixth commercial spaceflight to date after launching its commercial service in late June 2023 with a research mission.
Today's private astronaut flight was Virgin Galactic's first flight with all four seats on board Unity filled with paying customers. Previously, Virgin's commercial spaceflights included one seat taken up by an in-house flight instructor.
Opening up that extra seat means more revenue for Virgin Galactic — specifically, $450,000 more, which is the per-seat price for private astronauts. With all seats full of private customers, Virgin Galactic generates $1.8 million in revenue per flight with its Unity spaceship.
This past November, Virgin Galactic announced some big changes to focus on the development of its next generation of spaceships, called its Delta class. The company expects its Delta-class ships, once ready for revenue service, to generate $2.7 million to $3.6 million per flight because of two extra seats, depending on if it's a private astronaut or research mission.
Virgin laid off about 18% of its workforce as part of that "strategic realignment," including 73 positions in New Mexico, and the company has said it expects to start test flights of its Delta-class ships out of Spaceport America in mid-2025 with revenue service starting the year after. It's currently readying an assembly plant near Phoenix to build out those ships.
Following Friday's mission, Virgin has one more flight with its Unity spaceship planned out of Spaceport America in 2024 before pausing service with Unity in preparation for testing its Delta-class ships. The company hasn't set a date for its second flight of 2024 yet but has said it's planned for the second quarter; it'll carry both a researcher and private astronauts in a first for the company, per a news release.
Virgin plans to report its fourth quarter 2023 earnings results in late February, although the company hasn't set a specific date for that call yet.
"The success of 'Galactic 06' and the Company's other commercial spaceflights in recent months only increases our confidence in the repeatability of our product and our ability to deliver a superlative experience to our customers," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement following Friday's flight. "With the production of our next-generation Delta-class ships underway, we look forward to expanding our flight capacity with testing expected to start next year and commercial service in 2026."
Spaceport America, the 18,000-acre state-run facility near Truth or Consequences where Virgin Galactic is the anchor tenant, is nearing the completion of a year-long master planning process. Spaceport officials and folks leading that process said Virgin's layoffs and restructuring won't affect the facility's master planning.
But crowded airspace and a revamped lease with Virgin Galactic that could include a per-flight rate are considerations further down the road, once the space travel company's operations start back up in earnest at the Spaceport in 2025, Scott McLaughlin, executive director of Spaceport America, previously told New Mexico Inno.
Virgin Galactic stock (NYSE: SPCE) sits at $1.90 at the time of publishing after the company completed its sixth commercial spaceflight. The stock hit a three-month high of $2.70 on Dec. 27 before sliding over the past month, opening Friday at $1.96, per MarketWatch.
