Virgin Galactic's First Space Tourism Flight Delayed (Again) to Q2 2023
Virgin Galactic has postponed its commercial space tourism program for another three months, citing holdups during the refurbishment of its 14-year-old carrier aircraft.
Supply chain and labor constraints delayed the company's first planned flight from the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2023, Space.com reported(Opens in a new window) in May.
Now it's getting pushed back another quarter to the spring, as Virgin continues work on VMS Eve(Opens in a new window), which carries Virgin's spacecraft to its release altitude of approximately 50,000 feet. "While our short-term plans now call for commercial service to launch in the second quarter of 2023," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement(Opens in a new window), "progress on our future fleet continues and many of the key elements of our roadmap are now in place to scale the business in a meaningful way." It's not all stormy skies, though.
Virgin Galactic last month announced three major partnerships, each of which moves the spaceflight company another step toward suborbital tourism.
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