This Week In Launches: Virgin Galactic eying up next flight opportunity to keep momentum

A slow week at least here in the US when it comes to spaceflight activities but we do have an exciting moment Friday. With Virgin Galactic planning its third flight the end of this week, they are trying to keep their momentum going with a truly incredible launch rate.

This Week’s Launches

• September 8
  • SpaceX Falcon 9 Starlink Group 6-14, 7:45 P.M. ET
    • SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida
  • Virgin Galactic VSS Unity Galactic 03
    • Spaceport America, New Mexico

Join our Discord Server: Join the community with forums and chatrooms about space!

Virgin Galactic back at it again with VSS Unity

This week Virgin Galactic plans to launch its next crew of customers on its suborbital spaceplane VSS Unity. While the individual crew members haven’t been announced yet, we do know they have been long time ticket holders. Some as early as 2005, when SpaceShipTwo was just a dream.

If this flight does take place this Friday, it would likely occur in the morning when weather conditions out in New Mexico will allow for spaceflight activities. VMS Eve will carry Unity up to release altitude before dropping it with Unity then powering up its hybrid engine.

This will be Virgin Galactic’s fourth flight in four months, a rate that far surpasses Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. It’s difficult to determine who exactly is out ahead at the moment. Virgin Galactic has been launching crewed flights of its SpaceShipOne and Two planes since 2003 but only just made it to commercial operations a few months ago. While Blue Origin flew its first ticket holder in 2021 and uncrewed research missions since at east 2019, it has never reached a monthly launch cadence.

Quiet week ahead

In a rare occurrence we have a pretty quiet week. SpaceX launched a Starlink mission Sunday evening and will not launch its next Starlink mission until Friday. Outside of a few launches from China, we don’t have many missions to cover here.

We are nearing the end of the third quarter which means we are getting near to crunch times for companies to either get satellites delivered to their launch provider, get into orbit, or for the launchers, get missions into space. While this crunch time isn’t as fast past and noticeable like the tech or financial markets, end of year reports are just as important here as anywhere else.

It will be interesting to see how the year rounds out in a couple of months.