WASHINGTON — Blue Origin has announced plans to launch its New Shepard suborbital vehicle on its first flight since a mishap more than 15 months ago. Blue Origin announced on social media Dec. 12 that it will launch its New Shepard vehicle no earlier than Dec. 18 from its West […]
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WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic will reduce the frequency of flights of its current suborbital vehicle and stop them entirely by mid-2024 as it concentrates resources on the next generation of vehicles. In a Nov. 8 earnings call, company executives said flights of VSS Unity, which completed its fifth commercial suborbital […]
WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic said it will lay off staff and cut expenses to conserve resources for its next generation of suborbital spaceplanes. In a statement Nov. 7, Virgin Galactic announced a “strategic realignment of the Company’s resources and a related workforce reduction” to allow the company to focus on […]
WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic will conclude its schedule of suborbital spaceflights this year with a mission in early November whose crew will include a longtime advocate of suborbital research. The company announced Oct. 18 that the next flight of its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane, Galactic 05, is scheduled for a […]
WASHINGTON — A year after acquiring the assets of Masten Space Systems, Astrobotic has resumed flights of that company’s suborbital vehicle and plans to continue development of a larger rocket. Astrobotic announced Oct. 10 that it completed the first campaign of test flights by Xodiac, a vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing vehicle, since […]
WASHINGTON — Spanish company PLD Space launched its first suborbital rocket Oct. 6, with the company calling the flight a success despite reaching a lower altitude than planned. The company’s Miura 1 rocket lifted off from the El Arenosillo Experimentation Centre, a test site in southwestern Spain operated by the […]
WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic continued its monthly cadence of commercial suborbital spaceflights Oct. 6, carrying three customers that included the first person from Pakistan to go to space. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VSS Unity, took off from Spaceport America attached to its VMS Eve mothership at 11:28 a.m. Eastern. VSS […]
Updated 1:50 p.m. with post-flight statement. LOGAN, Utah — Virgin Galactic took its first private astronaut customers on a suborbital spaceflight Aug. 10, nearly two decades after it started selling tickets. Virgin’s VSS Unity spaceplane, attached to its VMS Eve mothership aircraft, took off from Spaceport America in New Mexico […]