Virgin Galactic lost $60 million in first quarter, announces new NASA partnership for supersonic tech
Space tourism venture Virgin Galactic lost $60 million in the first quarter of 2020, down from the $73 million net loss it suffered at the end of last year, according to the company’s earnings statement today. The company says it earned revenue of just $238,000 this first quarter by “providing engineering services.”
Along with these earnings results, Virgin Galactic is announcing that 400 people put down refundable deposits to fly on the company’s tourist spaceplane in the future. The full cost to fly on the vehicle is $250,000, but through a new initiative, Virgin Galactic allowed aspiring astronauts to put down just $1,000 to reserve a seat on a future flight. The company says those deposits represent “over $100 million of potential future revenue upon full ticket payment.”
Virgin Galactic is also announcing today that it is getting some help from NASA to develop future high Mach vehicles — or supersonic jets — that can potentially be used for high-speed air travel. Today, the company announced a new Space Act Agreement with NASA, which will leverage the space agency’s research in the field of supersonic air travel.
For the last two decades, Virgin Galactic’s primary goal has been to send paying customers to the edge of space and back to get a quick taste of weightlessness. The company’s primary vehicle is the VSS Unity, a spaceplane that deploys from underneath the wing of a giant carrier aircraft in midair. Pilots on board the spaceplane ignite the vehicle’s onboard engine to climb to an altitude 50 miles above the Earth, what many consider to be the boundary to space. At that height, passengers would experience a few minutes of floating before the plane glides back down to Earth and lands on a runway.
Though space tourism is Virgin Galactic’s ultimate focus, the company has expressed interest in expanding its capabilities. Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson has talked about eventually developing point-to-point travel, which entails rocket-powered vehicles taking passengers from one point on the Earth to another. Point-to-point travel has been floated by other companies, too, notably SpaceX, but such technology is far from reality. And there are concerns about the feasibility of such forms of travel.
Developing supersonic aircraft could be an important step to making point-to-point travel happen, though. And NASA has a lot of experience with these kinds of high Mach vehicles, with decades of history developing aircraft to travel faster than the speed of sound. In recent years, NASA has also been working on a new “silent” supersonic jet called the X-59 QueSST.
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Space tourism venture Virgin Galactic lost $60 million in the first quarter of 2020, down from the $73 million net loss it suffered at the end of last year, according to the company’s earnings statement today. The company says it earned revenue of just $238,000 this first quarter by “providing…
