Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. is a British-American spaceflight company founded by Richard Branson and the Virgin Group conglomerate, which retains an 11.9% stake through Virgin Investments Limited. Headquartered in California with launches in New Mexico, the company develops commercial spacecraft and provides suborbital spaceflights to space tourists. Virgin Galactic's suborbital spacecraft are air-launched from beneath a carrier airplane, White Knight Two. As of 2026, twelve Virgin Galactic flights have exceeded 50 miles altitude, entering outer space by US standards, all with VSS Unity spaceship since 2018. The company also spun off its under-development LauncherOne rocket, an air-launched satellite launch vehicle, to Virgin Orbit in 2017. Virgin Orbit was subsequently shut down in 2023. On 13 December 2018, VSS Unity made the project's first suborbital space flight, VSS Unity VP-03. Its two pilots reached an altitude of 82.7 kilometres (51.4 mi). In February 2019, the project carried three people, including a passenger, on VSS Unity VF-01; the spacecraft reached 89.9 kilometres (55.9 mi) and one member of the team floated within the cabin. On 11 July 2021, Branson and three employees rode on VSS Unity 22 as passengers, the first time a spaceflight-company founder travelled on his own ship into outer space. In February 2022, Virgin Galactic began selling tickets to the public for $450,000 apiece. The first such flight, Galactic 01, took place in June 2023. One year later, Unity made its final flight, Galactic 07; the company shifted focus to its Delta-class vehicles and a higher launch cadence. In February 2025, a ticket for a seat was estimated to cost about $600,000. In 2026, the company resumed taking reservations for seats at $1000, for a ticket price of $750,000.
Structure and history
Formation and early activities Virgin Galactic was founded in 2004 by British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, who had previously founded the Virgin Group and the Virgin Atlantic airline, and who had a long personal history of balloon and surface record-breaking activities.
The Spaceship Company
The Spaceship Company (TSC) was founded by Richard Branson through Virgin Group (which owned 70%) and Burt Rutan through Scaled Composites (which owned 30%) to build commercial spaceships and launch aircraft for space travel. From the time of TSC's formation in 2005, the launch customer was Virgin Galactic, which contracted to purchase five SpaceShipTwos and two WhiteKnightTwos. Scaled Composites was contracted to develop and build the initial prototypes of WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo, and then TSC began production of the follow-on vehicles beginning in 2008. In 2012, after Northrop Grumman acquired Scaled Composites, Virgin Galactic acquired the remaining 30% of The Spaceship Company.
Investors After a claimed investment by Virgin Group of US$100 million, in 2010 the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, Aabar Investments group, acquired a 31.8% stake in Virgin Galactic for US$280 million, receiving exclusive regional rights to launch tourism and scientific research space flights from the United Arab Emirates capital. In July 2011, Aabar invested a further US$110 million to develop a program to launch small satellites into low Earth orbit, raising their equity share to 37.8%. The New Mexico government has invested approximately $200m (£121m) in the Spaceport America facility, for which Virgin Galactic is the anchor tenant; other commercial space companies also use the site. On Monday, October 28, 2019, Virgin Galactic listed on the New York Stock Exchange, trading under the ticker symbol 'SPCE', the first publicly traded space tourism company. The company raised $450 million through a SPAC merger listing, and the company's market value after listing was more than $2.4 billion. At the time, the company claimed to have over 600 customer reservations representing approximately $80 million in total collected deposits and more than $120 million in "potential revenue".
Aims
Early history and background The Ansari X Prize was a space competition in which the X Prize Foundation offered a US$10,000,000 prize for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable crewed spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. It was modeled after early 20th-century aviation prizes, and aimed to spur development of low-cost spaceflight. Created in May 1996 and initially called just the "X Prize", it was renamed the "Ansari X Prize" on 6 May 2004 following a multimillion-dollar donation from entrepreneurs Anousheh Ansari and Amir Ansari. The prize was won on 4 October 2004, the 47th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch, by the Tier One project designed by Burt Rutan and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, using the experimental spaceplane SpaceShipOne. $10 million was awarded to the winner, and more than $100 million was invested in new technologies in pursuit of the prize.
Overview of the flights to be developed The spacecraft initially called SpaceShipTwo was planned to achieve a suborbital journey with a short period of weightlessness. Carried to about 16 kilometers, or 52,000 ft, underneath a carrier aircraft, White Knight Two, after separation the vehicle was to continue to over 100 km (the Kármán line, a common definition of where "space" begins). The time from liftoff of the White Knight Two mothership carrying SpaceShipTwo until the touchdown of the spacecraft after the suborbital flight would be about 2.5 hours. The suborbital flight itself would be only a small fraction of that time, with weightlessness lasting approximately 6 minutes. Passengers were to be able to release themselves from their seats during these six minutes and float around the cabin.
Development operations
2007 Scaled Composites fuel tank testing explosion In July 2007, three Scaled Composites employees were killed and three critically injured at the Mojave spaceport while testing components of the rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo. An explosion occurred during a cold fire test, which involved nitrous oxide flowing through fuel injectors. The procedure had been expected to be safe.
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