Virgin Galactic has announced that it will begin production of its new Delta spaceplane in March. It is expected to be assembled as soon as possible and to begin first test flights and then commercial flights as early as 2026.
New spaceplane
On February 26, the management of Virgin Galactic, a company known for the implementation of the project of tourist suborbital flights, announced income and losses. Among other things, it announced that the first sample of the Delta SpaceShip would begin assembly as early as March of this year.
The fact that the company’s plans would focus on the Delta spaceplane was known even before the commercial operation of their preliminary development, SpaceShipTwo with the name Unity, was terminated last year. Virgin Galactic raises funds diligently and assures that in a few years there will be several space-ready shuttles at once.
As Virgin Galactic representatives state, everything is going according to plan. The first Delta model will be assembled at their new facility near Phoenix. Its test flights are expected to begin in the summer of 2026, with the first commercial flights taking place at the end of it.
Are these plans realistic?
The plans announced by the Virgin Galactic management are indeed grandiose. After completing the assembly and ground testing of the spaceplane, they want to conduct 6-10 test flights with science payloads at once within a few months, and then move on to commercial flights very quickly.
They are expected to complete the second Delta sample immediately after the first one. This will give them a long-planned goal of two flights per week as early as the first half of 2027.
All of this raises serious doubts. Indeed, Virgin Galactic was told about weekly flights 15 years ago, when SpaceShipTwo was only just getting ready to fly. However, its development stretched on for years, and in the end it was never able to fly more than once a month.
As stated by Virgin Galactic, this happened because they didn’t know what to do then and consequently had to move forward in small steps. And now everything will be much faster, because there is no need to compose everything; it is necessary only to repeat on a new level what has already been done.
In parallel, the company is working on new options for using the spaceplane’s carrier, the giant Eve airplane. It is capable of lifting large loads into the upper atmosphere, but has been left idle. It is planned to think about scientific missions for it.
According to spacenews.com
