Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. is a British-American spaceflight company founded in 2004 by Richard Branson and the Virgin Group, which still holds a minority stake. It is headquartered in California, flies from New Mexico, and develops commercial spacecraft that carry paying passengers on suborbital flights. Its spaceships are air-launched from beneath the carrier aircraft White Knight Two. The VSS Unity craft made the first suborbital spaceflight of the programme on 13 December 2018, and Branson himself rode Unity in July 2021. Ticket sales to the public began in February 2022, the first commercial flight, Galactic 01, took place in June 2023, and Unity flew for the last time one year later as the company turned to its Delta-class vehicles. Virgin Galactic listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 28 October 2019 under the ticker SPCE, the first publicly traded space tourism company. A 2007 test explosion at Mojave killed three Scaled Composites employees.