If their proposed timeline works out, they would stop flying Unity mid 2024, start Delta test flights in mid 2025, then start Delta commercial flights in 2026. They have a lot of cash, so they should make it until then?
I really don’t get how this is a public company or how there’s supposed to be a big enough market for half million dollar suborbital tourism tickets.
The titan sub had enough customers with a spot worth a quarter million. Half a million is not a big jump from there. I guess there are enough billionaires out there to keep filling their coffers in such dangerous pursuits.
Wasn’t that sub also rife with cost-cutting measures to an ultimately unsafe degree? I also seem to recall stories of it’s owner, prior to the incident, saying that it had not yet reached the point of being profitable. That doesn’t mean that running a business off extreme tourism to rich people isn’t viable of course, but I’m skeptical that it’ll be all that big or successful of one.
That’s the advantage of having multiple companies. You can use profits from one to prop up another struggling one. Musk is the master of that. But considering that Virgin also operated the failed Virgin Orbital and Virgin Hyperloop, I don’t think Branson is a stranger to that either.
Meanwhile talking about safety, an earlier SpaceShipTwo prototype (VSS Enterprise) blew up spectacularly after the copilot unlocked the feather during the boost phase. It was supposed to be operated only during reentry. The feather had also activated without command after unlocking. Unless they got very serious after that accident, it’s very likely that SS2 is just as foolhardy as the Titan sub.
Stupidly wealthy people are sinking millions of dollars into building out-of-the-way places to hide in the event the torches and pitchforks come out. A fraction of that to go suborbital may as well be a long weekend.
