Having stumbled out of the starting blocks, is it possible for Virgin Galactic to catch up in the space tourism race?
between $250,000 and $450,000 a piece. But it may be too little too late to make Virgin Galactic a sustainable player of the space tourism game.“I do not have high hopes for Virgin Galactic’s long-term stability due to their excruciatingly slow pace to become operational, their high company expenses, and their mixed safety track record,” says Laura Forczyk, a space industry analyst and founder of the consultancy company Astralytical.
Virgin Galactic was founded in a ray of optimism cast by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites. Rutan and Scaled Composites designed and built a sub-orbital spaceplane dubbed SpaceShipOne that successfully flew to space twice within two weeks in 2004, winning the. Later that year, Branson joined forces with Rutan to develop SpaceShip Two, and Virgin Galactic was born.
Like SpaceShipOne, the Virgin Galactic SpaceShip Two is a rocket-propelled space plane. Carried aloft by a larger aircraft dubbed WhiteKnightTwo, the space plane detaches at 49,000 feet altitude, the rocket ignites and powers the space plane to just more than 50 miles altitude, considered theby the US government.
But by banking on that innovative technology as the key to unlocking the space tourism market, Virgin Galactic may have put itself at a major disadvantage. “They had way more technological problems with this less mature technology than they anticipated, and they had significant safety concerns” Forczyk says. “Traditional rockets have a long history of launching uncrewed as well as crewed spaceflight. Space planes do not have that history.
Those safety concerns became front and center in a tragic fashion on October 31, 2014, when a SpaceShipTwo space plane dubbed VSS Enterprise
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