Virgin Galactic to start assembly of first new spaceplane in March

HOUSTON - Virgin Galactic plans to start assembling the first of a new generation of suborbital spaceplanes next month with commercial flights expected to start in the middle of 2026.

In an Feb. 26 earnings call, company executives said assembly of the first Delta SpaceShip will start in March at a new facility near Phoenix. That would put the company on a path to begin test flights in the spring of 2026 and commercial flights, starting with research payloads, in the middle of 2026.

“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 on the call. “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.”

He used the call to highlight the progress made by Virgin and key suppliers on various components and subassemblies of the vehicle. Those items will be delivered to the Phoenix facility for final assembly and testing of the spaceplane.

The company said it is confident that, once assembled, the spaceplane can quickly go through a flight test program because it is derived from VSS Unity, the suborbital spaceplane it retired last summer.

“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.”

Once research flights begin, he said he expected “on the order of 6 to 10” flights carrying research payloads, including employees, that will also serve to test operations before beginning flights of private astronauts.

Colglazier said that, once those private astronaut flights begin, the company expects to quickly accelerate to its planned flight rate of two per week. “We will prudently ramp ourselves up a little bit as we lean into that, but I believe 2027, if not right January 1, right at the beginning of that year, we should be up at a pace that we’ve talked.”

Virgin’s immediate focus is getting the new Delta SpaceShips into operation to enable the company to achieve profitability. However, in the call Colglazier said the company is looking at additional applications of its vehicles, including repurposing the aircraft used to take the spaceplane aloft.

He noted that the company’s current “mothership” aircraft, VMS Eve, is unusual in that it can carry heavy payloads to altitudes as high as 15,000 meters. “We believe the same high-altitude heavy-lift capability that supports Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceflight business can also be of value to government and research customers, especially when a derivative model has extended flight duration,” he said.

He said the company is “moving towards solid preliminary design” of a variant of the aircraft design for high-altitude, long-endurance applications, such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “I think that’s a super smart opportunity for us and one that we are actively paying attention to because we think this is a real potential for the government.”

“With that said, first things first, we have to keep ourselves laser-focused on getting to the first of these two ships out and then the second one right behind it,” he added, to enable the company to achieve positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA).

The company had an adjusted EBITDA loss of $288.5 million in 2024, compared to a $427 million loss in 2023. The company ended 2024 with $657 million of cash and equivalents on hand to finance completion of the Delta SpaceShips.