Virgin Galactic resumes selling space tickets for $ 450,000 per seat

You now have the option of purchasing a seat aboard one of Virgin Galactic’s space tours, provided you can afford to pay $ 450,000 for it. The company reopened ticket sales less than a month after its founder Richard Branson flew with other “mission specialists” for Virgin Galactic’s first full-crew space flight. He made the announcement along with his financial results for the second quarter of the year, in which he also said the private space company “has made significant progress towards the start of commercial service in 2022”.

Virgin Galactic offers you three consumption options. In addition to a single seat that costs almost half a million, it also sells multi-seat packages for groups and offers full flight buybacks. The current iteration of the company’s VSS Unity spacecraft can accommodate four passengers in addition to two pilots, so selling full flights is not impossible. Virgin Galactic will prioritize its “important list of first hand lifters”, although it will create a follow-up priority list for customers interested in booking future flights.

Like CNBC Note, its next scheduled flight will have members of the Italian Air Force on board. After that, the company will take a hiatus until mid-2022 to refurbish the VMS Eve, its carrier jet aircraft. Since there will be another scheduled test flight after this time, it means Virgin Galactic is delaying its first official flight to pay the astronauts again. Earlier this year, the company was hoping to launch its first commercial flight in early 2022, but has now said CNBC that its new target is at the end of the third quarter of 2022.