While the company has carried employees on several previous test missions, the latest launch was the first with ticket-holding passengers.
“This is a big deal,” Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic’s president of spaceline missions and safety, said in an interview before the launch. “It’s the thing we were founded for.”It comes much later than planned: Virgin Galactic was started in 2004 and had hoped to ferry tourists to the cosmos as early as 2008.
The company now faces pressure to make Branson’s dream of offering regular space tourism missions a reality. The company’s chief executive officer, Michael Colglazier, said he’s confident focusing on suborbital human space travel first will give the company the ability to branch into other businesses later.
“I think this is going to be a capacity-constrained business for a couple of decades, at least,” Colglazier said. “We need to normalize this industry, it’s not usual for your neighbour to go to space.”Thursday’s flight, called Galactic 01, offered the crew an opportunity to run experiments and test payloads in a space environment.
In 2007, three employees at Scaled Composites, a contractor started by aerospace entrepreneur Burt Rutan, were killed during an engine test for Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane.
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