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
Vision for Space Exploration be directed toward reducing human spaceflight costs sufficiently for the betterment of low Earth orbit research, business, and tourism. Alternatively, VSE could afford advances in other scientific research (astronomy, selenology), in-situ lunar business industries, and lunar-space tourism. The VSE budget required termination the Space Shuttle by 2010 and of any US role in the International Space Station by 2017. This would have required, even in the most optimistic plans, in a period of years without human spaceflight capability from the US. Termination of the Space Shuttle program, without any planned alternatives, in 2011 ended virtually all US capability for reusable