Virgin Galactic’s president explains how VSS Unity is now flying frequently

Enlarge / In February 2019, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo reached space for the second time in 10 weeks. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

On Monday, Virgin Galactic announced that it will conduct its next commercial spaceflight, Galactic 03, as early as September 8. This will be the company’s third commercial spaceflight, and it will carry three as-yet-unnamed passengers who bought their tickets on the company’s space plane back in the early 2000s.

Should the flight occur in early September, it will mark the company’s fourth spaceflight in four months, an impressive cadence after a fairly long downtime. Such a flight would also cement Virgin Galactic’s leadership in the suborbital space tourism race with Blue Origin, which has been grounded for nearly a year after a launch accident with its New Shepard System nearly a year ago.

To understand why there was such a long downtime after Sir Richard Branson’s flight on Virgin Galactic in 2021 and to learn how the company has reached a monthly flight cadence, I recently had a long interview with Mike Moses, the company’s chief of operations and president. Moses came to Virgin Galactic in 2011 from NASA, where he worked as a flight director and then as a senior leader of the Space Shuttle program.