Rob Coppinger has an excellent in-depth look at Virgin’s Galactic’s over at FlightGlobal.com. Among the interesting nuggets in Rob’s report:
- Some 250 customers have signed up for suborbital flights thus far;
- Virgin’s sales and marketing arm has reported an after-tax profit £136,400 ($274,800), even though the company has yet to fly a single customer;
- Estimated costs have risen from around $100 million to approximately $250 million, almost half of which ($120 million) will go toward development of SpaceShipTwo and its mother ship, White Knight 2;
- The first commercial flights will not occur until around 2010, around three years behind the original schedule;
- Virgin Galactic hopes to eventually have 2 flights per day, a rate that would generate about $600 million annually.
This is an excellent piece of writing that raises some interesting questions about how easy it will be for Virgin to turn a profit and for investors to begin to see returns.
