Virgin's first space sightseeing flight was originally scheduled for 2010, but was pushed back to 2020 and then 2022. It won't be until mid-2023 that Virgin Galactic will finally offer its space sightseeing trips, specifies Numerama.
Billionaire Richard Branson's company is falling behind rival Jeff Bezos: Blue Origin is already on its sixth tourist trip.
The announcement was made in a rather confidential manner: Virgin Galactic's financial results, published on August 4, 2022, indeed contain a sentence with important information: "The start of commercial service is expected in the second quarter of 2023 , due to delays in the Mothership upgrade program.
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Objective: 200 flights per year
The mother ship is an essential link in sending tourists into space: it is the machine that propels the passenger shuttle to a certain altitude before it propels itself into space.
Virgin asked the manufacturer Boeing for a number of improvements to the machine in order to increase the rate of flights to nearly 200 trips per year.
Two other motherships have been ordered, are under construction and should not be delivered before 2025. In 2021, Richard Branson had beaten his billionaire rival Jeff Bezos by a few days by successfully completing his first flight in space.
Since then, Blue Origin has regained its lead.
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