The space tourism business said on Wednesday it remains on track to begin tests in the spring of 2026, with commercial flights following months later.
Virgin has previously said it believes Delta could fly up to 125 times a year, or around three times a week, as opposed to the more sporadic launches of its predecessor, VSS Unity.
“The production and launch timeline for the new ships remains on track, with our first commercial research spaceflight expected in the summer of 2026, and the first private astronaut spaceflight in the fall of 2026,” Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said.
“We are able to be more specific with projecting our timelines because we now have line of sight to the delivery dates of each and every tool and part that supports assembly.”
The company believes it will be able to develop Delta much more quickly because it is derived from Unity, which was only retired last summer. The new model will be carried by the same mothership aircraft, VMS Eve.
“Unity required moving in small incremental steps to build up the knowledge about the spaceship’s performance and limits,” said Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic’s spaceline president.
“The test flights of Delta will be much more like regression testing, where we are incrementally expanding how Delta flies, but doing so by comparing it to how we know Unity flew.”
Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson beat off competition from Jeff Bezos in 2021 to go to space in Galactic’s fourth crewed spaceflight.
However, Virgin then subsequently had to carry out maintenance for both its mothership aircraft, VMS Eve, and its SpaceShipTwo vehicle after Branson’s test flight.
Missions resumed in 2023 with a commercial flight for the Italian Air Force followed by flights carrying private tourists.
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Virgin Galactic stopped flying last year to concentrate on its next-generation spaceplane, opening a system integration facility in Southern California.
“This ground-based test facility, which houses a testing platform known as an Iron Bird, has begun tests of initial subsystems and will add components over the course of the year to increase its scope and effectiveness,” said Galactic.
“Using an Iron Bird test rig is common practice in aerospace development programs and allows Virgin Galactic to test and verify the operation of dozens of Delta subsystems – including avionics, feather actuation, pneumatics and hydraulics.
“This strategic investment is an important building block to ensure efficient production and safe operations of the Delta Class spaceships, allowing the team to validate the functionality of components early in the development process.”
Virgin Galactic appeared at last year’s Australian Space Summit alongside Loredana Santo, the professor behind the pioneering Italian experiment.
Santo is a professor of manufacturing processes at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy and has conducted in-depth research on organic shape-memory polymers.
According to Professor Santo, suborbital flights enable scientists to test how a range of materials develop in a microgravity environment.
“The same material was tested in a suborbital flight using very large samples,” Professor Santo told Space Connect.
“You can test bigger objects on suborbital flights compared to the ISS, which only allows you to test very small components. Therefore, it is much more complicated to conduct these kinds of experiments on the ISS.
“This is because the cost is substantial for high volumes and heavy materials. In suborbital flights, you don’t have this problem. You can test big structures.”
Adam Thorn
Adam is a journalist who has worked for more than 40 prestigious media brands in the UK and Australia. Since 2005, his varied career has included stints as a reporter, copy editor, feature writer and editor for publications as diverse as Fleet Street newspaper The Sunday Times, fashion bible Jones, media and marketing website Mumbrella as well as lifestyle magazines such as GQ, Woman’s Weekly, Men’s Health and Loaded. He joined Momentum Media in early 2020 and currently writes for Australian Aviation and World of Aviation.
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