Virgin Galactic technical experts." The company has responded that "the company and its contractors 'have internal milestones, such as schedule estimates and goals, but the companies are driven by safety and the completion of the flight test program before moving into commercial service.' Virgin Galactic’s schedules have always been consistent with internal schedules of its contractors and changes have 'never impacted flight safety'." 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
Space Coast Office of Tourism had a strong focus on tourism through the space industry, and the industry accounted for as much as 15% of the tourism in the region, but with a reduction in shuttle launches this dropped to under 5% by 2005. Accordingly, the office had to move their focus to alternative tourism operations, selling "beaches, cruise ships and nature tourism", and after the Space Shuttle "Columbia" disaster in 2003, the Space Shuttle was dropped from their advertising campaigns. Although the "Discovery's" launch in 2005 did see a return of astronaut imagery, the region's dependency on the space industry was much reduced, and