Enlarge / Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity rocket plane ignites its rocket motor moments after release from a jet-powered carrier aircraft high above New Mexico. (credit: Virgin Galactic )

Last year, Virgin Galactic seemed to finally be hitting a stride toward making commercial suborbital spaceflight. The company flew its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane to the edge of space six times in six months, giving a few Virgin Galactic customers a taste of spaceflight after waiting more than a decade.

Finally, it appeared that Virgin Galactic turned a corner , moving past the setbacks and course corrections that delayed founder Sir Richard Branson's aim of bringing spaceflight to a wider population. Virgin Galactic officials wouldn't describe the company's next step as a setback or a course correction. It's part of an intentional business strategy to make Branson's dream a reality.

"That dream behind Virgin Galactic came into sharp focus as we repeatedly flew spaceship Unity in 2023," said Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic's president and CEO, in a quarterly earnings call this week. "Now, in 2024, we're poised for even more meaningful accomplishments as we build the fleet of spaceships that will turn the dream into reality and long-term success."

White Knight Two carries the first SpaceShipTwo during a glide test. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

Virgin Galactic reported an anomaly on its most recent flight, Galactic 06 , which took place 12 days ago from a spaceport in New Mexico.

In a statement released Monday, the company said it discovered a dropped pin during a post-flight review of the mission, which carried two pilots and four passengers to an altitude of 55.1 miles (88.7 km).

This alignment pin, according to Virgin Galactic, helps ensure the VSS Unity spaceship is aligned to its carrier aircraft when mating the vehicles on the ground during pre-flight procedures. The company said the alignment pin and a shear pin fitting assembly performed as designed during the mated portion of the flight, and only the alignment pin detached after the spaceship was released from the mothership.

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson. (credit: Eric Berger)

Sir Richard Branson has ruled out putting more money into his lossmaking space travel company Virgin Galactic, saying his business empire “does not have the deepest pockets” any more.

Virgin Galactic, which was founded by Branson in 2004, last month announced it was cutting jobs and suspending commercial flights for 18 months from next year, in a bid to preserve cash for the development of a larger plane that could carry passengers to the edge of space.

The group has said it has enough funding to carry it through to 2026, when the bigger Delta vehicle is expected to enter service. But some analysts are expecting Galactic to ask investors for more money in about 2025.

Welcome to Edition 6.19 of the Rocket Report! While we wait for SpaceX to launch the second full-scale test flight of Starship, a lot of the news this week involved companies with much smaller rockets. Astra is struggling to find enough funding to remain in business, and Virgin Galactic says it will fly its suborbital Unity spaceplane for the last time next year to focus on construction of new Delta-class ships that should be easier to turn around between flights. It's a tough time to raise money, and more space companies will face difficult decisions to stay alive in the months ahead.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Galactic plans "pause" in flight operations. Virgin Galactic will reduce the frequency of flights of its current suborbital vehicle and stop them entirely by mid-2024 as it concentrates resources on the next generation of vehicles, Space News reports . This was unexpected news for anyone outside of the company. As Ars has previously reported , Virgin Galactic has ramped up the flight rate for its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane to about one mission per month, a rather impressive cadence, especially when Blue Origin, the other player in the suborbital human spaceflight market, has not flown any people to space in more than a year.

Enlarge / The view of Earth's curved horizon from Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocketplane. (credit: Virgin Galactic )

It has been fun to watch Virgin Galactic string together six flights to suborbital space this year. The company was founded by Richard Branson in 2004 to open the experience of spaceflight to everyday people and make some money in the process. Virgin Galactic hasn't achieved those goals yet, but the company has reason to celebrate its successes over the last six months.

There is sometimes ribbing of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin from space enthusiasts because they don't fly astronauts or payloads into orbit, and they cater to wealthy clients. Passengers on a Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin flight experience a few minutes of weightlessness as they reach the apex of a trajectory that, in Virgin Galactic's case, barely breaks the 80-kilometer (50-mile) threshold, the altitude where space begins, based on the US government's definition.

But they offer access to microgravity and the space environment at a fraction of the cost of an orbital flight. Instead of several tens of millions of dollars per seat, we're talking about $450,000 for a ride to space with Virgin Galactic. Blue Origin costs a bit more.

Enlarge / The four private astronauts who flew into orbit with SpaceX on the Inspiration4 mission in 2021, the first fully commercial human spaceflight mission to low-Earth orbit. (credit: Inspiration4/John Kraus )

There are three US companies now capable of flying people into space—SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic—and representatives from those three companies told lawmakers on Wednesday that the industry is not yet mature enough for a new set of federal safety regulations for their customers.

A nearly 20-year moratorium on federal regulations regarding the safety of passengers on commercial human spaceflight missions is set to expire on January 1. It was scheduled to lapse at the beginning of October, but Congress added a three-month extension to a stopgap spending bill signed into law to prevent a government shutdown.

That allows a bit more time for lawmakers to write a more comprehensive commercial space bill addressing several issues important to the commercial space industry. These include industry-wide concerns about the Federal Aviation Administration's ability to quickly license commercial launch and reentry operations, a hurdle SpaceX is eager to overcome as it waits for FAA approval to launch the second full-scale test flight of its giant Starship rocket.

Enlarge / A Vega rocket rides a column of exhaust from its solid-fueled first stage, kicking off a mission to deliver 12 small satellites into orbit. (credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace )

Welcome to Edition 6.15 of the Rocket Report! We're now more than three-quarters of the way through the year, and as of Thursday, there have been 156 orbital launches since January 1. Last year, which set a record for global launch activity, we didn't reach 156 orbital launches until mid-November. At the cadence set so far in 2023, we could end the year at roughly 200 orbital launches. We'll see if the world's launch providers, led by SpaceX and China, keep pace for next couple of months. I'm betting they do.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

A Spanish rocket startup launched its first test flight. A Spanish launch company, named PLD Space, claimed success on Saturday after its suborbital Miura 1 rocket lifted off and achieved an altitude of 46 kilometers (29 miles) before plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean, Ars reports . Saturday's launch from Southern Spain is exciting for several reasons, but most notably because PLD Space is the first of Europe's new space launch companies to have some credible success. To that end, Saturday's modest flight represented the dawn of the European commercial space age.