Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. is a British-American spaceflight company founded by Richard Branson and the Virgin Group, which retains a stake through Virgin Investments Limited. Headquartered in California with launches from New Mexico, the company develops commercial suborbital spacecraft that carry space tourists, air-launched from beneath a carrier airplane called White Knight Two. Its suborbital spaceship VSS Unity first reached space with pilots on 13 December 2018, carried its first passenger in February 2019, and carried Branson himself in July 2021 as the first spaceflight-company founder to fly on his own vehicle. The company spun off its LauncherOne rocket project to Virgin Orbit in 2017. Virgin Galactic began selling tickets to the public in 2022 and flew its first commercial flight, Galactic 01, in June 2023, later shifting focus to its next-generation Delta-class vehicles.