Virgin Galactic

[hyphen]

You have to have a high headline price to negotiate from...

Ring him up and offer $300k Beati, then also get a week at Necker thrown in.

[Flooble]

hyphen said:

You have to have a high headline price to negotiate from...

Ring him up and offer £300k

[Caruso]

Beati Dogu said:

Virgin Galactic have announced their ticket prices. You can get a group discount, but single seat prices start at $450,000.

I’ll pass, thanks.

Does that include VAT and Air Passenger Duty?

[bloomen]

I'll see what a ticket on the Bezos funbus costs before deciding. I'd pay a premium for the properly phallic experience.

[anonymous-user]

JuniorD said:

Once one of these big fireworks goes bang, sending some billionaires twinkling into the atmosphere I think the interest will wane somewhat. Which begs the question, would this be covered under a standard world wide travel insurance policy?

Why not? You’re only going 50 miles.

[JuniorD]

Cliffe60 said:

JuniorD said:

Once one of these big fireworks goes bang, sending some billionaires twinkling into the atmosphere I think the interest will wane somewhat. Which begs the question, would this be covered under a standard world wide travel insurance policy?

Why not? You’re only going 50 miles.

With Bezos’ cockrocket that could easily be 50 miles in every direction.

[MartG]

Seems that not all is well in Virgin's paradise...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-red-w...

[Eric Mc]

Very interesting.

[jingars]

MartG said:

Seems that not all is well in Virgin's paradise...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-red-w...

Yes, a fascinating and worrying article; thanks for posting the link.

[LordLoveLength]

Apparently he’s been grounded now for flightpath deviation
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-584...

[jingars]

Thread resurrection.

Eric Berger, posting on Twitter, has posted that "Virgin Galactic lost half a billion dollars in 2022. That is roughly the equivalent of 160 commercial flights on VSS Unity"



Branson is not a Jeffy B or an Elon; wonder for how much longer he will be prepared to fund this sub-orbital endeavour?
Given the current status, acquiring external funding is going to be problematic.

[pincher]

Has there only ever been one ‘proper’ flight (either for the Virgin or the Bezos efforts), or have there been subsequent one which haven’t attracted any publicity?

Edit - should have just Googled - next flights delayed until Q2 this year.

[JuniorD]

maybe the old "If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline..” Branson quote needs an update?

[Eric Mc]

Virgin Galactic are back in action again this afternoon after a two year gap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoNmEO6eOec

[Eric Mc]

NASA Spaceflight livestream -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bQQ5lxfKGU

[skwdenyer]

jingars said:

Thread resurrection.

Eric Berger, posting on Twitter, has posted that "Virgin Galactic lost half a billion dollars in 2022. That is roughly the equivalent of 160 commercial flights on VSS Unity"



Branson is not a Jeffy B or an Elon; wonder for how much longer he will be prepared to fund this sub-orbital endeavour?
Given the current status, acquiring external funding is going to be problematic.

He isn’t funding it; losses were covered by cash raised in the markets + revenues.

The real winner in all this was, of course, Rutan There’s such a huge gulf between an experimental rocket plane and a commercially-viable service. I’m not absolutely sure Brandon understood that.

[Talksteer]

skwdenyer said:

jingars said:

Thread resurrection.

Eric Berger, posting on Twitter, has posted that "Virgin Galactic lost half a billion dollars in 2022. That is roughly the equivalent of 160 commercial flights on VSS Unity"



Branson is not a Jeffy B or an Elon; wonder for how much longer he will be prepared to fund this sub-orbital endeavour?
Given the current status, acquiring external funding is going to be problematic.

He isn’t funding it; losses were covered by cash raised in the markets + revenues.

The real winner in all this was, of course, Rutan There’s such a huge gulf between an experimental rocket plane and a commercially-viable service. I’m not absolutely sure Brandon understood that.

The air launched, piloted rocket plane was a very good and cheap way to win the X-Prize. It has turned out to be a very expensive way to fly paying passengers.

The issue with Virgin Orbits entire business is that man rating anything is basically the most expensive task. SpaceX have spent in the region of $2-3 billion on Falcon 9 development and $4 billion on Crew Dragon. Virgin have probably spent about $2 billion on their systems.

In exchange SpaceX have a system which can address multiple markets all of which are profitable. The irony being that the company shooting for the fully orbital system has flown more space tourists than the space tourism firm because their space tourism solution was mostly funded by NASA.

[Flooble]

Talksteer said:

The air launched, piloted rocket plane was a very good and cheap way to win the X-Prize. It has turned out to be a very expensive way to fly paying passengers.

The issue with Virgin Orbits entire business is that man rating anything is basically the most expensive task. SpaceX have spent in the region of $2-3 billion on Falcon 9 development and $4 billion on Crew Dragon. Virgin have probably spent about $2 billion on their systems.

In exchange SpaceX have a system which can address multiple markets all of which are profitable. The irony being that the company shooting for the fully orbital system has flown more space tourists than the space tourism firm because their space tourism solution was mostly funded by NASA.

I think it's also reasonable to note that along with SpaceX having spent around 4 times as much as Virgin Galactic, 100+ of their "test flights" were funded by paying customers flying satellites, prior to putting any humans on board the rocket.

[skwdenyer]

Talksteer said:

The air launched, piloted rocket plane was a very good and cheap way to win the X-Prize. It has turned out to be a very expensive way to fly paying passengers.

The issue with Virgin Orbits entire business is that man rating anything is basically the most expensive task. SpaceX have spent in the region of $2-3 billion on Falcon 9 development and $4 billion on Crew Dragon. Virgin have probably spent about $2 billion on their systems.

In exchange SpaceX have a system which can address multiple markets all of which are profitable. The irony being that the company shooting for the fully orbital system has flown more space tourists than the space tourism firm because their space tourism solution was mostly funded by NASA.

I think the big problem is that it is a tech dead end. Blue Origin have built a "baby rocket" for tourist use, but using tech common across their other operations.

VG were going to offer payload services, then worked out there was no easy way to do it with the kit they had, so went down a dead end of a wholly different air-launch system (VO), which has gone bust.

It's also notable that VG is still basically hand-flown - it is a test pilot's dream job. But again it doesn't scale well.

Had VG got going far far earlier, I think they'd have had a tremendous business. The time has been the killer.

[Talksteer]

skwdenyer said:

Talksteer said:

The air launched, piloted rocket plane was a very good and cheap way to win the X-Prize. It has turned out to be a very expensive way to fly paying passengers.

The issue with Virgin Orbits entire business is that man rating anything is basically the most expensive task. SpaceX have spent in the region of $2-3 billion on Falcon 9 development and $4 billion on Crew Dragon. Virgin have probably spent about $2 billion on their systems.

In exchange SpaceX have a system which can address multiple markets all of which are profitable. The irony being that the company shooting for the fully orbital system has flown more space tourists than the space tourism firm because their space tourism solution was mostly funded by NASA.

I think the big problem is that it is a tech dead end. Blue Origin have built a "baby rocket" for tourist use, but using tech common across their other operations.

VG were going to offer payload services, then worked out there was no easy way to do it with the kit they had, so went down a dead end of a wholly different air-launch system (VO), which has gone bust.

It's also notable that VG is still basically hand-flown - it is a test pilot's dream job. But again it doesn't scale well.

Had VG got going far far earlier, I think they'd have had a tremendous business. The time has been the killer.

The man rating has been the thing which stretched out the time!

Also not to put too finer point on it the ultimate leadership of Virgin is from a morally questionable, innumerate, PR charlatan. The newspace companies that have succeeded have been the ones lead by hands on engineers.