Virgin Galactic unveils VSS Imagine, the first in the SpaceShip III series

Virgin Galactic on Tuesday unveiled the latest spacecraft addition to its fleet, VSS Imagine, the spacecraft representing the first in its class of next-generation SpaceShip III vehicles.

The deployment of VSS Imagine gives the space tourism company a second spacecraft to begin testing, as Virgin Galactic continues to work on final VSS Unity development tests, with its next space flight test slated for May.

“In order for the business to grow where we aspire, we need two things: we need a lot more ships than we currently have and we also need the ships we offer. to build. in a way that they can be maintained in a way that we can have much faster [turnaround times between flights] than what we have with Unity, ”Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic, told CNBC.

VSS Imagine is the third spacecraft the company has built. The VSS Enterprise was destroyed in a fatal test flight accident in 2014, while the VSS Unity performed two space flights, the last in February 2019. Colglazier noted that VSS Imagine “was designed in a way that incorporates the lessons we have learned from all the flight tests on Unity. “

“It allows us to access things the right way – we know what things need to be tackled on a routine basis, so that we can give people easy access,” Colglazier said.

Virgin Galactic shares were down 1.4% in pre-market trading from its previous close of $ 29.21 per share.

Colglazier said the Imagine VSS is the first of the company’s generation SpaceShip III, adding that it is “already rotating the manufacturing team to get to work” on the next spacecraft, which has been named VSS Inspire. . The biggest improvement between the SpaceShip II and SpaceShip III classes is turnaround time, both in terms of making each spacecraft and the amount of maintenance needed between each flight, Colgalzier said.

SpaceShip III was designed with a more “modular” approach than the previous generation, as Colglazier noted that VSS Unity “was essentially built in place” which is “just a slower process”.

“The SpaceShip III class is integrated components – the assemblies are created in parallel,” he said.

Virgin Galactic President Mike Moses defined VSS Imagine’s “modular” advancements as breaking down production into sections: “The fuselage, the cabin, the wing body, the planar shape of the wings, and then the tail beams – all were built separately. “

The company has yet to identify how many SpaceShip III vehicles it plans to build, but Coglazier said more spacecraft will be needed to meet the company’s backlog of requests. Virgin Galactic is also planning to fully reopen ticket sales after a flight test with founder Sir Richard Branson, expected this summer.

But while SpaceShip III features a variety of enhancements, Colglazier said it was still “quite a handcrafted part” and the build does not yet have what “I call production level tooling. “.

Virgin Galactic has created a new internal program called the Delta Class, which the company is designing with the aim of “building spaceships in parallel”. While the Delta class will be functionally the same as the SpaceShip III vehicles, Colglazier said the Deltas are “where I think we are reaching scale on the manufacturing front.”

In addition, Virgin Galactic is evaluating potential partners “to effectively accelerate our next mothership program,” said Colglazier.

Virgin Galactic has a carrier aircraft, or “mothership,” called VMS Eve. Colglazier said last month that the company will need to build more to meet its target flight rates. He thinks it is likely that Virgin Galactic could “find good partnerships” among aerospace companies to build the next carrier aircraft, as opposed to building “its own mother ship assembly plant.”

Moïse said Virgin Galactic was tackling the issue of electromagnetic interference that delayed the second attempt of its space flight test from December to May.

“You can never completely eliminate electromagnetic interference – it’s an artefact of aerospace electrical systems – but we could really reduce the source a little bit and that’s what the team set out to do,” said Moses.

Electromagnetic interference was the cause of the disruption of his December flight. Moses said Virgin Galactic has made changes to some of its “electronic components, as well as the sensors that those components read and then use to tell what’s going on” on VSS Unity.

“We implemented these two changes, we tested them in the field. Now we are installing them in the ship,” said Moses. “We will be doing a full end-to-end check on the ship and, assuming these results are good, we appear to be still on track for this May target.”

Virgin Galactic went public through a deal with special-purpose acquisition company Chamath Palihapitiya in 2019. A wave of companies have followed suit recently, with seven space companies in the past six months announcing PSPC deals : Redwire Space, Rocket Lab, Spire Global, BlackSky, Astra, AST & Science and Momentus.

Colglazier, who joined Virgin Galactic after its publication, said he believed two factors were at play.

“The US government [has opened] markets for space, opening up the possibility for commercial enterprises to enter and bring a degree of innovation that probably did not exist before, “said Colglazier.” The second thing is, with as much innovation as you see it coming in the last couple of years, you are now starting to see the technology coming to where innovation and just some kind of entrepreneurial focus are able to find more and more opportunities. “

He believes that these factors “combine with a good capital market environment” to create “a growth industry here that did not exist just a few years ago.”

“Space is back in the minds of consumers,” added Colglazier.