WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic says it does not expect an investigation into an issue on its most recent suborbital launch to delay its next one as it turns its focus to a new generation of vehicles.
In an earnings call Feb. 27, company executives said they still expected to fly the Galactic 07 mission by its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane in the second quarter of the year despite an incident on the Galactic 06 flight Jan. 26 where an alignment pin fell from the VMS Eve carrier aircraft after deploying Unity. The company said Feb. 5 it had notified the Federal Aviation Administration of the incident.
“We are making really solid progress,” said Mike Moses, president of spaceline operations at Virgin Galactic, on the call. He said the company could now recreate the circumstances that allowed the alignment pin to come loose and is now working to “enhance the robustness” of the retention mechanism for the pin.
“We don’t anticipate any impact on Galactic 07 at all for quarter two, and the investigation has been going really well with the FAA in partnership,” he said.
That flight will carry four customers, which Michael Colglazier, Virgin’s chief executive, described as a “blended manifest” of researchers and private astronauts. The company has not disclosed the customers who will fly on that mission or a more specific launch date.
Galactic 07 may also be the final flight of VSS Unity. The company said in November it planned to halt flights of the spaceplane in the middle of the year to focus its resources on development of the Delta class of suborbital vehicles. That included Galactic 06 and 07 in the first and second quarters and a possible Galactic 08 in the middle of the year. The company did not state in the earnings call if it planned to fly Galactic 08.
Virgin Galactic has been working to maximize the revenue from those final Unity flights. Colglazier said they expected an average per-seat revenue of more than…
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