Virgin Galactic sets Oct 5th launch date for its fifth commercial suborbital flight in ’23
Virgin Galactic today announced that the launch window for its fifth commercial suborbital flight this year and ninth overall will open on Oct 5th.
The flight will include three private passengers, two Americans and one Pakistani, and a crew of five Virgin Galactic employees.
At this point I don’t consider these suborbital flights to be very newsworthy. However, I decided to highlight this news release because of its stark contrast with Blue Origin. Even before last year’s mishap that grounded Blue Origin’s own suborbital spacecraft, New Shepard, it never flew this frequently. Virgin Galactic took far too long to begin flying (two decades), but it does appear that is now wasting no time trying to catch up.
Blue Origin meanwhile continues to drift along, accomplishing little and appearing to do even less with time.
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That amazes me.
It looked for awhile that Bezos had the suborbital tourism market in his pocket, and that Branson was about to go under.
The moral of the story is:
You can’t be a space supporter and have a trophy wife running up clubbing bills.
I personally do not consider either of them to be space launch companies.
They are just space view companies.