Virgin Galactic's first "Delta-class" space plane just made its maiden voyage.

The next-gen suborbital vehicle, named Apeiron (Greek for "Boundless"), lifted off for the first time ever on Thursday (Oct. 28). Flying beneath the wings of its carrier aircraft, VMS Eve, Apeiron traveled from Virgin's manufacturing site in Mesa, Arizona, to its launch site, Spaceport America in New Mexico.

"Seeing the ship fly beneath Eve to Spaceport America was a moment years in the making," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement on Thursday. "To our team and our astronaut community: your Spaceship has arrived."

Apeiron will undergo a series of checks and tests at Spaceport America, leading up to a planned start of commercial service in the spring of 2027.

During those customer flights, Eve will carry Apeiron to an altitude of about 45,000 feet (13,700 meters), then drop the space plane. Apeiron will fire up its onboard rocket motor, which will carry the six-passenger, two-pilot vehicle to suborbital space.

Passengers will experience a few minutes of weightlessness and get to see the curve of Earth against the blackness of space before coming down for a runway landing back at Spaceport America.

Virgin Galactic has done this before, with its VSS Unity space plane. Unity flew seven commercial suborbital missions during its operational life, which ran from June 2023 to June 2024.

Apeiron and other Delta-class planes are built for a much heavier workload, according to Virgin Galactic.

"Designed to fly twice per week with a vehicle lifetime of more than 500 missions, each Spaceship in the next-generation fleet is built to support the economics of a scaled commercial operation, with increased flight cadence and a cost profile unprecedented in the industry," company representatives wrote in the same statement.

And there will indeed be a fleet, if all goes to plan. The second Delta ship is under construction, for example, and is expected to enter service in mid-2027, according to Virgin Galactic.

Apeiron and its Delta-class siblings will need to fly a lot to deal with Virgin Galactic's backlog: Nearly 700 ticket-holders are currently waiting to fly, according to the company. And demand remains high; the latest batch of seats, which were priced at $750,000 apiece, sold out. Virgin plans to sell the next tranche of tickets for $850,000 each, LATTE Luxury News reported.

When Apeiron gets up and running, it will be the only game in town for suborbital space tourists.

Virgin Galactic once shared the skies with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, which flew paying customers to the final frontier on its New Shepard vehicle. New Shepard conducted 14 crewed suborbital flights between July 2021 and January 2026 but is currently grounded while the company focuses on helping NASA land Artemis astronauts on the moon.

Virgin Galactic has officially unveiled the first space plane in its next-gen "Delta" line, and announced the results of the worldwide vote to choose its name.

Spaceship Apeiron will be the first Delta-class vehicle, Virgin Galactic revealed on Wednesday (Oct. 28). Apeiron (pronounced "A'-per-on," according to the announcement) takes its name from the ancient Greek word meaning "boundless," and was selected through a public poll that drew votes from thousands of people across 83 countries and six continents.

The reveal comes on the same day that the space plane is scheduled to be flown from its manufacturing facility in Mesa, Arizona, to Spaceport America in New Mexico, where the vehicle will undergo final preparations before beginning flight tests.

Apeiron was one of four finalist names that Virgin Galactic narrowed down from a list of 276 employee-submitted suggestions. After the public weighed in, Apeiron came out on top over Horizon, Explorer and Ascend.

“Apeiron, the Boundless, captures the ambition of human spaceflight and the possibilities it opens for humanity," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Golglazier said in a company statement. "The extraordinary response to the public vote made choosing this name even more meaningful."

The shiny new space plane will be attached to Virgin Galactic's VMS Eve carrier aircraft for its journey to Spaceport America, where engineers will complete work on its avionics software ahead of Apeiron's first flight tests and eventual operational missions.

The new Delta-class vehicle replaces Virgin's earlier space plane model, VSS Unity, which flew seven suborbital missions during its operational lifetime between the summers of 2023 and 2024. The company suspended VSS Unity flights to focus efforts on Apeiron's development, and now hopes to begin flying customers again in mid-2027.

Once they're in regular operation, Virgin plans to fly each of its Delta-class vehicles as many as eight times a month. A second Delta-class space plane is already under construction and is expected to join Apeiron at Spaceport America around the same time that Virgin restarts flying passengers, about 675 of whom are still waiting in line with tickets for a seat on one of the company's suborbital jaunts, according to the company's Q2 2026 SEC filing.

Now, more than 100 of those future space travelers are beginning their initial preparations for flight, with more ticketholders expected to follow once Virgin brings the second Delta-class vehicle into service. When the company began selling seats aboard its space plane in 2014, when VSS Unity was still under construction, tickets were priced around $200,000. Today, that price has jumped to $850,000 per seat, according to a report by Latte.

Like its predecessor, Apeiron and future Delta-class vehicles are designed for short, suborbital spaceflights, and are not capable of reaching orbit around Earth. They fly above the internationally recognized boundary of space, the 100-kilometer-high (62 miles) Karman line, and provide those onboard with several minutes of weightlessness and great views of the planet below.

Virgin Galactic plans to share further details about its upcoming flight tests during its November earnings call.

Virgin is one of two American companies that have flown paying customers to suborbital space and back. The other, Blue Origin, suspended its flights earlier this year to focus on helping land NASA astronauts on the moon.

Update for 4 p.m. ET on Oct. 28: Virgin Galactic unveiled its first Delta-class space plane on Wednesday (Oct. 28), revealing that it's named Apeiron. You can read about it here.

Space tourists and citizen astronauts rejoice! A new suborbital spacecraft is about to be introduced that will fly ticketholders on brief, suborbital journeys just above Earth.

Virgin Galactic plans to unveil its first Delta-class spaceship on Wednesday (Oct. 28), before transporting the spacecraft from Mesa, Arizona, to Spaceport America in New Mexico. Alongside that reveal, the company will also announce the spacecraft's name, selected through a public vote held across more than 80 countries.

Following its debut, the Delta-class vehicle will journey to the spaceport attached to Virgin Galactic's VMS Eve carrier aircraft, marking a transition from assembly to the beginning of official flight testing. "The arrival of our lead Spaceship at Spaceport America will be an enormous milestone in a years-long journey to build the world's first human spaceship platform designed for regular commercial spaceflight," said Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier in a statement.

Virgin Galactic is targeting mid-2027 for the spacecraft's first commercial spaceflight. Simultaneously, the company is also working on a second Delta-class vehicle, which it hopes to enter into service before the end of next year. And, with the first Delta vehicle leaving the nest, the company's Mesa factory is shifting focus to the completion of the second which will lead to structural testing and preparations for its rocket engine assembly.

Virgin Galactic announced its Delta manufacturing plans in 2022, initially anticipating research flights to begin in late 2025 and passenger service in 2026. Those plans have since run into multiple delays. The company said its revised schedule allows for the additional time needed to integrate and validate the spacecraft's avionics software, with final testing to take place at Spaceport America.

Its Delta vehicle will replace Virgin's earlier spaceplane model, VSS Unity, which began operations in June 2023, and completed seven commercial missions before its final flight on June 8, 2024. Virgin suspended Unity's commercial flights to concentrate on developing the next-generation fleet, which is designed to carry more passengers and fly considerably more frequently.

Each Delta-class vehicle is equipped to accommodate up to six passengers, compared with Unity's four, and is expected to complete as many as eight spaceflights per month — more than 10 times the rate Virgin was flying Unity.

When Virgin Galactic began selling seats aboard its planned spaceplane in 2004, tickets cost about $200,000 apiece. By 2014, nearly 700 people had reserved spots on future flights. Now, more than 100 of those future space travelers are beginning their initial preparations, with additional ticketholders expected to follow as the company works toward operating two spaceships by the second half of 2027.

Virgin Galactic plans to share live updates during Wednesday's transport flight, weather and technical conditions permitting, and provide further details about its upcoming flight tests during its November earnings call.

Virgin Galactic's next customers will have to wait a bit longer to get off the ground.

The suborbital space tourism company hasn't been to the final frontier since June 2024. It had been targeting late 2026 for the resumption of commercial service, but that's not going to happen, we learned on Wednesday (Aug. 12).

"We've moved our first commercial spaceflight to this coming February to allow additional time to complete avionics and systems installations," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said on Wednesday, during a call the company held to discuss its financial results for the second quarter of 2026.

"No single issue is driving the schedule push," he added. "Rather, we have experienced modest time-duration extension across hundreds of relatively small but important installation tasks involved in the first build of our new spaceship."

The coming mission won't be Virgin Galactic's first commercial spaceflight overall. That occurred in June 2023 and was performed by the company's VSS Unity space plane, which was retired a year later following its seventh operational, customer-carrying flight.

Rather, Colglazier was referring to the debut of the company's first "Delta class" vehicle, an advanced iteration that's designed to fly much more frequently than Unity ever did — twice per week, if all goes to plan.

Virgin Galactic is currently building two Delta planes, which will be broadly similar to Unity in most ways. They will be piloted vehicles that seat six passengers, for example, and will take off beneath the wings of a carrier plane. That mothercraft will drop the Delta vehicles at an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), after which they'll ignite their rocket motors and head to suborbital space.

Their suborbital jaunts will likely last 60 to 90 minutes, and they'll end with a landing at the same runway where they started.

The second Delta spaceship is expected to join the first one at Spaceport America in New Mexico — Virgin Galactic's commercial hub — in March 2027, Colglazier said.

Colglazier also announced that Virgin Galactic's latest "tranche" of passenger bookings was oversubscribed, demonstrating a continuing strong demand from customers despite the flight hiatus. The per-seat price for that tranche was $750,000 — a number that's no longer available.

"We have retired the $750,000 price point, and we plan to open a new tranche of spaceflight expeditions this fall at higher price points," Colglazier said.

He didn't say what the new price would be. But the jump could be considerable, based on recent history: The ticket price before $750,000 was $600,000, and the one before that was $450,000.

Virgin Galactic lost nearly $56 million in Q2 2026, the company announced in Wednesday's earnings call. That was an improvement over Q2 2025, when the company was about $67 million in the red.

But things should change considerably next year, according to the company.

"With our second [Delta] spaceship entering service, we continue to forecast that we will achieve a flight rate of 10 or more spaceflights per month by the end of the second quarter of 2027," Virgin Galactic Chief Financial Officer Doug Ahrens said during Wednesday's call.

"This flight rate is an unprecedented achievement in human spaceflight, and this is made possible with our highly reusable spaceship design," he added. "Given these flight rate expectations, we continue to forecast quarterly positive cash flow within 2027."

The outlook is even rosier over the long haul, Ahrens stressed.

"We expect each new spaceship to cost approximately $60 million to produce," he said. "Given a conservative lifetime estimate of 500 flights per spaceship, with six astronauts per spaceflight, average pricing of $600,000 per spaceflight expedition, and a contribution margin over 80% per spaceflight, each new spaceship has the potential to generate over $1.4 billion of lifetime contribution margin."

Virgin Galactic will be the only game in town once it gets back up and running. Its chief competitor in the suborbital space tourism business, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, recently put its flights on hold to focus on helping NASA return astronauts to the moon.

Blue Origin has never revealed its ticket prices, but Ahrens said they were believed to be in the $1 million to $2 million range.

"I don't think we need to be driving our prices up that quickly," he said. "But there is strong and solid demand, and we do expect each time we release a tranche of tickets, it will be priced higher than the tranche before. And that's appropriate, so I think you'll see us do that for a little bit longer."

The university known as the cradle of astronauts will soon send a few more folks to the final frontier.

Twenty-eight alumni of Indiana-based Purdue have flown to space or been selected for spaceflight. That impressive roster includes Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom, as well as Adam Fuhrmann and Yuri Kubo, members of NASA's just-announced 2025 astronaut class.

And the list just got longer, for Purdue announced today (Sept. 23) that it's sending a team of researchers, students and alumni to suborbital space with Virgin Galactic in 2027, on a mission called Purdue 1.

"This mission with Purdue University is a powerful demonstration of what becomes possible when research institutions and educators gain direct access to the microgravity environment," Virgin Galactic President of Spaceline Mike Moses, a former NASA space shuttle launch integration manager who also went to Purdue, said in a statement.

"By enabling researchers to accompany and interact with their experiments in real time, we are not just advancing science — we are empowering the next generation of innovators and expanding the frontiers of educational opportunity," added Moses, whose wife Beth Moses is Virgin Galactic's chief astronaut instructor, a veteran of multiple suborbital spaceflights and a former Boilermaker herself.

Purdue 1 will carry five passengers to and from suborbital space, along with two pilots. Those passengers are Steven Collicott, a Purdue professor of aerospace engineering; Purdue graduate student Abigail Mizzi; alumnus Jason Williamson and two other alumni who will be named at a later date.

Virgin Galactic's space plane can carry six crewmembers, but one seat will be removed from the cabin on this flight to accommodate the mission's research payloads, according to the university.

Those experiments will be carried out by Collicott and Mizzi. Collicott's work will look at how liquids spread over a surface, while Mizzi will investigate how liquids oscillate in zero gravity.

"If you spill water on your kitchen counter, you’ll see it spreads more in some ways than others," Collicott said, in a description of his experiment. "Is this drinking water in a space station or a liquid packed with nutrients for a plant growth system? We need to get this important data to learn more about these flows to aid in spaceflight hardware design for future long-duration missions and perhaps so that future payloads can be automated, which would make missions even less expensive."

Virgin Galactic's space plane lifts off under the wings of a carrier aircraft, which drops it at an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters). The spacecraft ignites its onboard rocket motor, powering its own way to suborbital space, then glides back down for a runway landing here on Earth.

The company reached space for the first time in December 2018 and conducted its first fully crewed flight in July 2021. (Virgin Group founder Richard Branson was one of the passengers on that debut jaunt).

Virgin Galactic has flown seven commercial flights to date, the most recent one occurring in June 2024. The company has paused its launches to get a new, more advanced version of its space plane, known as the Delta class, up and running.

These new vehicles are expected to start flying in 2026, so Purdue 1 will be a Delta flight.

Virgin Galactic's most recent ticket price was $600,000. That was for a seat on the old VSS Unity space plane, however; prices for the Delta spacecraft have not yet been set, but they're expected to be a bit higher.

Collicott's seat will be paid for by NASA; the professor won a research proposal competition through the agency's Flight Opportunities program. Donations accepted by Purdue will fund Mizzi's trip, while the three alumni on the flight will pay for their own seats, according to the university.

Virgin Galactic's spaceflight drought will last just about two years, if all goes according to plan.

The suborbital space tourism company last went to the final frontier in June 2024, on the final flight of its VSS Unity space plane. Virgin retired Unity to focus on developing its new, more efficient "Delta class" vehicles — and the first of those advanced, six-passenger ships remains on track to debut next year, according to the company.

"An enormous amount of work is taking place across our company, as well as at our key suppliers," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said during an earnings call with investors on May 15. "We continue to expect our first [Delta] research spaceflight will take place in summer of 2026, with private astronaut flights following in fall of 2026."

That call, which reported Virgin Galactic's financial results for the first quarter of 2025, provided a number of other updates as well.

For example, Colglazier said the company — which currently has about 675 customers on its manifest — plans to start accepting flight reservations again in the first quarter of 2026. New customers will be brought onboard via a new "highly bespoke education sales process" that will feature distinct "waves."

"This approach has several intended benefits for customers," Colglazier said. "Tailoring the number of new arrivals into our future astronaut community during each wave allows us to provide a white-glove onboarding experience that will form the foundation of each customer's journey to space. From a yield-management perspective, this allows us to adjust our pricing wave by wave."

Ticket prices have not yet been set, though it's expected to be higher than the $600,000 that the most recent customers paid, he added.

Virgin Galactic is currently building two Delta-class ships but plans to expand the fleet over time. The company will be quite busy once the first one comes online. Each of the new space planes is designed to fly twice per week, Colglazier said — a big leap in cadence over VSS Unity, which flew seven commercial passenger missions from June 2023 until its retirement a year later.

Virgin Galactic employs an air-launch strategy. Like VSS Unity, each Delta ship will lift off from a runway beneath the wings of a large carrier aircraft, which will drop the space plane at altitude. The spaceship will then ignite its onboard rocket motor, powering its own way to suborbital space, and come back down to Earth for a landing on the same runway from which it took off.

In last quarter's earnings call, Virgin Galactic mentioned the possibility of making the carrier aircraft a multipurpose vehicle — using it to haul something other than a space plane into the sky. Over the past few months, the company has continued investigating this potential vehicle variant, which it calls HALE ("High Altitude Long Endurance")-Heavy.

"Since last quarter, we've connected with leaders within the Department of Defense, national laboratories and aerospace and defense companies to ascertain the potential product market fit of our carrier aircraft capabilities with government customer needs," Colglazier said.

"We've been encouraged by initial feedback, which has identified both existing and emerging missions that could potentially benefit from access to HALE-Heavy support aircraft," he added. "Examples of these missions could include airborne research and development testing; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support; command and control node capabilities; and multiple opportunities within the emerging Golden Dome [missile defense] initiative."

To date, all of Virgin Galactic's suborbital missions have lifted off from Spaceport America in New Mexico. But the company is looking to fly from a second site as well, likely in either Europe or the Middle East.

Virgin Galactic is making progress on this goal as well, Colglazier said during the May 15 call.

"We are midway through our feasibility assessment with the Italian government for a spaceport in southern Italy," he said.

Virgin Galactic has revealed the design for its Delta class spaceship.

The suborbital space tourism firm posted a video on Wednesday (Aug. 7) showcasing an animation of the Delta design, which is sleek and modular, with components that aim to provide new efficiencies for human spaceflight.

Virgin Galactic says its new Delta ships are being built to operate with an average turnaround time of just three days, which, the firm says, would mark an enormous breakthrough and would structurally change the cost of human spaceflight. Its previous spaceship, VSS Unity, was capable of flying once a month.

The new spacecraft, powered by a hybrid rocket system, will also upgrade from four passengers to six over the old spaceship.

Delta is set to fly for the first time no earlier than 2026. But the company says it is progressing well on design work.

"Progress on our Delta Class spaceship program was substantial in Q2, with the pace of design completion accelerating and tool fabrication underway," Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic, said in an Aug. 7 statement alongside the company's financial results for the second quarter. 

"In the next month, our teams will pivot primary focus from design completion to the build and test phases of our production spaceships, which remain on track to enter commercial service in 2026."

Related: Who is Virgin Galactic and what do they do?

The firm says it plans to generate revenue of $450 million per year in the years following the first two Delta spaceships entering service. The video also outlines plans for up to five ships at spaceports around the world in the future.

The final flight of the previous space plane, VSS Unity, took place in June. Virgin Galactic then switched to focusing on its Delta plans.

Virgin Galactic hit a major milestone in its new generation spaceship plans last month. The company completed a new Delta space plane manufacturing facility in Mesa, Arizona in July.

WASHINGTON — The developer of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo suborbital space tourism vehicle has won U.S. regulatory approval to begin powered flight testing of the rocket-propelled craft later this year.

George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic's president and chief executive, said in a May 30 announcement that the experimental launch permit from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) authorizes the Scaled Composites development team "to progress to the rocket-powered phase of test flight, bringing us a major step closer to bringing out customers to space."

Virgin Galactic's flight system consists of two vehicles, SpaceShipTwo and its WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft. Since late 2010, Scaled Composites, which designed and developed both craft, has been conducting unpowered tests in which SpaceShipTwo is released from WhiteKnightTwo and glides back to a runway landing.

Virgin Galactic says it has taken deposits from more than 500 customers agreeing to pay $200,000 for a ride on SpaceShipTwo. The SpaceShipTwo spacecraft are designed to launch six passengers and two pilots into suborbital space, offer a few minutes of weightlessness, then return to Eath. The company, led by entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, has not set a date for beginning commercial service.

The company said May 30 that it expects to begin rocket-powered test flights before the end of 2012.

"In preparation for those powered flights, SpaceShipTwo will soon return to flight, testing the aerodynamic performance of the spacecraft with the full weight of the rocket motor system on board," Virgin Galactic said in the announcement. "Integration of key rocket motor components, already begun during a now-concluding period of downtime for routine maintenance, will continue in the autumn. Scaled expects to begin rocket powered, supersonic test flights under the just-issued experimental permit toward the end of the year."

This article was provided by Space News, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.