Virgin Galactic Aces First Commercial Flight

Virgin Galactic's first commercial launch lifted off from New Mexico's Spaceport America at 10:30 a.m. ET (1430 GMT) this morning.  As a reminder, the mission is in an air-dropped space plane, VMS Unity, that flies to suborbital space after being dropped by the airplane carrying it, VMS Eve.  Unlike the Virgin Orbit carrier, a Boeing 747, VMS Eve is a Burt Rutan-designed airplane built by Scaled Composites, with a dual fuselage that carries the Unity under the center wing.

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo vehicle VSS Unity, separated from its VMS Eve mothership aircraft at about 11:29 a.m. Eastern above cloudy skies in southern New Mexico. The vehicles took off from Spaceport America at 10:30 a.m. Eastern.

Unity, flying a mission designated Galactic 01, fired its hybrid rocket motor for approximately 60 seconds. It reached a peak altitude of 85.1 kilometers before gliding to a runway landing at the spaceport at 11:43 a.m. Eastern. [52.9 km - SiG]

The Galactic 01 mission was a research flight for the Italian Air Force and Italy’s National Research Council.  The Italian Air Force called the mission Virtute 1, so you may see that name for the flight as well.  

[The mission] carried Col. Walter Villadei and Lt. Col. Angelo Landolfi of the Italian Air Force and Pantaleone Carlucci of Italy’s National Research Council. The three planned to conduct 13 experiments during the mission, ranging from biomedical data collection to microgravity studies of fluid mechanics and combustion.

In a press conference after the flight, the three Italians said they were pleased with the flight. “It was much better than expected,” Villadei, who commanded Virtute 1, said. He noted the crew was able to carry out all their planned experiments.
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VSS Unity was flown by Mike Masucci, making his fourth spaceflight, along with Nicola Pecile, a former Italian Air Force pilot who now works for Virgin and was on his first spaceflight.

As the infomercials say, "but wait!  There's more!"  In addition to those five, there was a sixth person on board.  Colin Bennett, a Virgin Galactic astronaut trainer who had previously flown on VSS Unity in 2021, was also on board.  His role was to monitor the research environment during the flight and “do a holistic evaluation of the research mission so that we can continually improve on the experience,” according to Sirisha Bandla, VP of government affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, in a preflight interview yesterday.

Italian Air Force Col. Walter Villadei (with microphone) speaks at Spaceport America after his Galactic 01 suborbital spaceflight. Image Credit: SpaceNews/Jeff Foust 

This is expected to be just the beginning.  The next mission is scheduled for NET August, a time interval largely dedicating to inspecting Unity at a very fine level of detail.  Virgin Galactic says that hundreds of people have booked a ride aboard the ship at a price (most recently) of $450,000 per seat.  They expect to conduct flights once per month after August and are developing a next generation "Delta Class" vehicle that will be able to fly weekly.  

After the Delta vehicles come online, which is slated to begin happening in 2026, Virgin Galactic could potentially carry customers to space every day, from a variety of sites around the globe.