Virgin Galactic delays next commercial spaceflight to February 2027

Full text

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.

The view from Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity vehicle during one of its trips to suborbital space. (Image credit: Virgin Galactic) 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.

He didn't say what the new price would be. But the jump could be considerable, based on recent history: The ticket price before $750,000 was $600,000, and the one before that was $450,000.

Virgin Galactic lost nearly $56 million in Q2 2026, the company announced in Wednesday's earnings call. That was an improvement over Q2 2025, when the company was about $67 million in the red.

But things should change considerably next year, according to the company.

"With our second [Delta] spaceship entering service, we continue to forecast that we will achieve a flight rate of 10 or more spaceflights per month by the end of the second quarter of 2027," Virgin Galactic Chief Financial Officer Doug Ahrens said during Wednesday's call.

"This flight rate is an unprecedented achievement in human spaceflight, and this is made possible with our highly reusable spaceship design," he added. "Given these flight rate expectations, we continue to forecast quarterly positive cash flow within 2027."

The outlook is even rosier over the long haul, Ahrens stressed.

"We expect each new spaceship to cost approximately $60 million to produce," he said. "Given a conservative lifetime estimate of 500 flights per spaceship, with six astronauts per spaceflight, average pricing of $600,000 per spaceflight expedition, and a contribution margin over 80% per spaceflight, each new spaceship has the potential to generate over $1.4 billion of lifetime contribution margin."

Virgin Galactic will be the only game in town once it gets back up and running. Its chief competitor in the suborbital space tourism business, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin , recently put its flights on hold to focus on helping NASA return astronauts to the moon.

Blue Origin has never revealed its ticket prices, but Ahrens said they were believed to be in the $1 million to $2 million range.

"I don't think we need to be driving our prices up that quickly," he said. "But there is strong and solid demand, and we do expect each time we release a tranche of tickets, it will be priced higher than the tranche before. And that's appropriate, so I think you'll see us do that for a little bit longer."