British billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has moved tourist flights into space for the fourth quarter of 2022. In October, the firm will begin refurbishing and upgrading its VSS Unity spacecraft and VMS Eve launch vehicle. This process will last up to 10 months and will end in June – August 2022. After reports of the suspension of flights, the company's shares plummeted by 20%.
At the low, the stock traded below $ 20 per share.
The company representatives emphasize that the improvement program is necessary to increase the safety factor of the aircraft. They say this will “improve reliability, durability and reduce maintenance requirements for commercial operations.”
The refurbishment and improvement work should take eight to ten months and will not end until summer 2020, a Virgin Galactic spokesman told CNBC. Only after that, the company will resume test flights of the Unity 23 ship – it was previously going to launch in October 2021.
In July, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) opened proceedings against Virgin Galactic: its spacecraft violated airspace allocated for flight. This could be due to the fact that during takeoff, the ship's engines worked for several seconds longer than necessary. At the time of the proceedings, all flights of the company were banned.
Due to these problems, Virgin Galactic had to postpone the launch of the first commercial mission, Unity 23, in conjunction with the Italian Air Force until mid-October.
In September, the FAA lifted the ban, but due to spacecraft repairs, the flight will still not take place.
Also in Virgin Galactic are planned flights of ships Unity 24 and Unity 25 – the latter was supposed to be a tourist. After the postponement, it is not known when Branson's company will be able to make a commercial flight, on which it began selling tickets back in August.
Photo: instagram virgingalactic
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