Virgin Galactic delays next commercial spaceflight to 2027

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Virgin Galactic's next customers will have to wait a bit longer to get off the ground.

The suborbital space tourism company hasn't been to the final frontier since June 2024. It had been targeting late 2026 for the resumption of commercial service, but that's not going to happen, we learned on Wednesday (Aug. 12).

"We've moved our first commercial spaceflight to this coming February to allow additional time to complete avionics and systems installations," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said on Wednesday, during a call the company held to discuss its financial results for the second quarter of 2026.

"No single issue is driving the schedule push," he added. "Rather, we have experienced modest time-duration extension across hundreds of relatively small but important installation tasks involved in the first build of our new spaceship."

The coming mission won't be Virgin Galactic's first commercial spaceflight overall. That occurred in June 2023 and was performed by the company's VSS Unity space plane, which was retired a year later following its seventh operational, customer-carrying flight.

Rather, Colglazier was referring to the debut of the company's first "Delta class" vehicle, an advanced iteration that's designed to fly much more frequently than Unity ever did — twice per week, if all goes to plan.

Virgin Galactic is currently building two Delta planes, which will be broadly similar to Unity in most ways. They will be piloted vehicles that seat six passengers, for example, and will take off beneath the wings of a carrier plane. That mothercraft will drop the Delta vehicles at an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), after which they'll ignite their rocket motors and head to suborbital space.

Their suborbital jaunts will likely last 60 to 90 minutes, and they'll end with a landing at the same runway where they started.

The second Delta spaceship is expected to join the first one at Spaceport America in New Mexico — Virgin Galactic's commercial hub — in March 2027, Colglazier said.

Colglazier also announced that Virgin Galactic's latest "tranche" of passenger bookings was oversubscribed, demonstrating a continuing strong demand from customers despite the flight hiatus. The per-seat price for that tranche was $750,000 — a number that's no longer available.

"We have retired the $750,000 price point, and we plan to open a new tranche of spaceflight expeditions this fall at higher price points," Colglazier said.