Enlarge / In February 2019, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo reached space for the second time in 10 weeks. (credit: Virgin Galactic )

On Monday, Virgin Galactic announced that it will conduct its next commercial spaceflight, Galactic 03, as early as September 8. This will be the company's third commercial spaceflight, and it will carry three as-yet-unnamed passengers who bought their tickets on the company's space plane back in the early 2000s.

Should the flight occur in early September, it will mark the company's fourth spaceflight in four months, an impressive cadence after a fairly long downtime. Such a flight would also cement Virgin Galactic's leadership in the suborbital space tourism race with Blue Origin, which has been grounded for nearly a year after a launch accident with its New Shepard System nearly a year ago .

To understand why there was such a long downtime after Sir Richard Branson's flight on Virgin Galactic in 2021 and to learn how the company has reached a monthly flight cadence, I recently had a long interview with Mike Moses, the company's chief of operations and president. Moses came to Virgin Galactic in 2011 from NASA, where he worked as a flight director and then as a senior leader of the Space Shuttle program.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 launch of 22 Starlink satellites on Wednesday, August 16, 2023. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 6.07 of the Rocket Report! I spent a few days last week in southern New Mexico, visiting Spaceport America and Virgin Galactic's facilities there. I felt a renewed sense of optimism about the company's future among the people there and pride in reaching a more operational cadence of missions. Here's hoping they can keep flying high.

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.

Astra delays debut of its Rocket 4 . It's been a year since Astra shelved its first orbital-class rocket after just two successful launches in seven flights. At the time, Chris Kemp, Astra's founder and CEO, unveiled a new rocket design he said would be more reliable and capable of carrying heavier cargo into orbit. A year later, the development of Astra's new launch vehicle—named Rocket 4—appears to have slowed to a crawl, Ars reports .

Enlarge / Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity is seen at Spaceport America in front of the company's iconic headquarters.

SPACEPORT AMERICA, New Mexico—I'm standing on a spaceport runway at the ass end of nowhere. The sun has started to creep over the craggy San Andreas Mountains, illuminating the massive, alien spaceship-like building here in New Mexico that Virgin Galactic calls home.

I have traveled all this way in early August to find a little illumination of my own. In particular, I want to know just what the heck Virgin Galactic is up to. Founded by Sir Richard Branson some 19 years ago, the company has had a wild ride in its quest to become the world's first bona fide space tourism business. Along the way, Virgin Galactic's stock soared as high as $56 a share, then crashed to now barely above $3. One of its spaceships crashed, too, nearly nine years ago, killing a test pilot. But now it's moving forward in a positive direction.

Later on Thursday morning, with a stunning rocket blast initiated about 14 km above the New Mexico desert, the company completed its seventh flight to an altitude of 88 km, above the vast majority of Earth's atmosphere. Most of the previous missions were test flights to push the envelope of the VSS Unity spacecraft's capabilities. Thursday's flight, dubbed Galactic 02, was actually the first time the company flew a private astronaut into space—and this is the reason Virgin Galactic exists, after all.

Enlarge / Anastatia Mayers, Jon Goodwin, and Keisha Schahaff are the private customers on board Galactic 02. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

SPACEPORT AMERICA, New Mexico—On Thursday morning, Virgin Galactic plans to fly private citizens into space for the first time.

The company's VSS Unity spacecraft is due to be released from its carrier aircraft after 9 am local time (15:00 UTC), and it will then rocket above an altitude of 80 km. The vehicle will carry two pilots (CJ Sturckow and Kelly Latimer), company representative Beth Moses, and three private customers.

The private astronauts are an interesting mix. They include the company's first paying customer, an 80-year-old named Jon Goodwin, who competed for Great Britain in the 1972 Munich Olympics as a canoeist. He is joined by Keisha Schahaff and Anastatia Mayers, a Caribbean mother-daughter duo whose tickets were purchased by the nonprofit Space for Humanity in order to broaden access to space.

Enlarge / A crew of six passengers, including former professional football player and television anchor Michael Strahan, stroll past the Blue Origin New Shepard booster they rode into space in December 2021. (credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images )

In 2004, Congress passed a law that established a moratorium on federal safety regulations for commercial astronauts and space tourists riding to space on new privately owned rockets and spacecraft. The idea was to allow time for new space companies to establish themselves before falling under the burden of regulations, an eventuality that spaceflight startups argued could impede the industry's development.

The moratorium is also known as a "learning period," a term that describes the purpose of the provision. It's supposed to give companies and the Federal Aviation Administration—the agency tasked with overseeing commercial human spaceflight, launch, and re-entry operations—time to learn how to safely fly in space and develop smart regulations, those that make spaceflight safer but don't restrict innovation.

Without action from Congress, by the end of September, the moratorium on human spaceflight regulations will expire. That has many in the commercial space industry concerned.