Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic is a spaceflight company within the Virgin Group. It is developing commercial spacecraft and aims to provide suborbital spaceflights to space tourists and suborbital launches for space science missions. Virgin Galactic plans to provide orbital human spaceflights as well. SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic's suborbital spacecraft, is air launched from beneath a carrier airplane known as White Knight Two. Virgin Galactic's founder, Sir Richard Branson, had initially suggested that he hoped to see a maiden flight by the end of 2009, but this date has been delayed on a number of occasions, most recently by the October 2014
Space tourism returned aboard Soyuz TM-11. As of 2018, no suborbital space tourism has yet occurred, but since it is projected to be more affordable, many companies view it as a money-making proposition. Most are proposing vehicles that make suborbital flights peaking at an altitude of . Passengers would experience three to six minutes of weightlessness, a view of a twinkle-free starfield, and a vista of the curved Earth below. Projected costs are expected to be about $200,000 per passenger. At the end of the 1990s, MirCorp, a private venture that was by then in charge of the space station, began seeking