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Virgin Galactic will start regular service taking commercial passengers to space next month

Home> News

Updated 09:25 10 Jul 2023 GMT+1Published 14:59 8 Jul 2023 GMT+1

Virgin Galactic will start regular service taking commercial passengers to space next month

Commercial space travel is on the way, albeit quite expensive

Joe Harker

Joe Harker

Featured Image Credit: Virgin Galatic

Topics: News, Space, Technology, Travel, Richard Branson

Joe Harker
Joe Harker

Joe graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in Journalism and worked for Reach before joining the LADbible Group. When not writing he enjoys the nerdier things in life like painting wargaming miniatures and chatting with other nerds on the internet. He's also spent a few years coaching fencing. Contact him via [email protected]

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@MrJoeHarker

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Virgin Galactic is set to start a regular service launching tourists into space next month, but if you fancy yourself a budding astronaut, it's going to cost you.

The first commercial flight of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space launch was successfully completed in June with a team of Italian researchers being flown up to the edge of space.

Now the goal for Virgin Galactic is monthly space launches which will take paying customers on the same journey and the idea is for those regular commercial space flights to begin in August.

Less than three years ago, the company was launching its first manned flight to space. Two years ago, Branson beat Jeff Bezos and became the first billionaire with a space program to make it up there themselves.

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Now with the Virgin Galactic flight carrying the team of researchers having succeeded, the plan is to make the launches a regular occurrence.

The plan is for paying passengers to travel up to space from next month onwards.
Virgin Galactic

If all goes to plan next month will be the starting point for these regular commercial launches, though it'll take them a while to get through the waiting list of everyone who already bought a ticket.

If you want to get on board a Virgin Galactic space flight it'll cost you $450,000, but there's about 800 other potential passengers who've also paid up for the chance to fly to space.

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With several hundred passengers having bought a ticket and finite space on the spacecraft, it'd take several years of regular monthly flights to get through the backlog, so before you blow the life savings on a trip to space be confident that you'll still be around in a decade or so.

Perhaps with time things will get a little bit quicker and Virgin Galactic will be able to provide more regular trips for passengers.

Earlier this year, Branson told LADbible that the goal was to eventually make commercial space travel something available and affordable for the general public.

Commercial space flights will begin from August, though ticket prices start at $250,000.
Virgin Galactic

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Unfortunately he thinks it's gonna be a long, long time until that's a reality, saying they're only 'at the start of making it more accessible to more people'.

Branson explained that it was 'gonna take some years' before the cost of commercial space travel might come down and it might be something like a 'few decades' before we're really there.

It's something he'd like to see in his lifetime and presumably something space travel aficionados would love to have the chance to do.

Considering where our ability to fly was about a century ago, the leaps and bounds we've made since then have been incredible, so who knows what advancements we'll make in the coming years?

  • Inside Jeff Bezos' $10,000,000,000 space station plan that will host tourism trips from Earth
  • NASA is launching a $165,000,000 ‘PUNCH’ mission to the Sun this week in first of its kind space experiment
  • Qatar to build massive floating luxury resort that will constantly spin in the ocean
  • First look at stranded NASA astronauts as they finally return to Earth after nine months stuck in space

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