With various space tourism companies offering flights to space, some questioned if there would be enough people willing to pay the exorbitant prices to go. Well, it turns out there is a real demand for it. Virgin Galactic has said that is has sold its latest 100 tickets in record time, and at a higher price than its previous batches.
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The company has now sold a total of 700 tickets for its quick tourist trips to suborbital space. It hopes to have 1,000 seats booked by the time it commences with its commercial flights.
“We’re selling tickets ahead of the pace we planned,” Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic’s CEO, said during a presentation on the company’s third-quarter earnings. “The pricing strategy we announced last quarter has been well received.” The current price of the fare is $450,000 per seat, well above the $200,000-$250,000 paid by some 600 customers from 2005 to 2014.
Virgin Galactic reopened ticket sales just a month after the company successfully flew its founder, billionaire Richard Branson, to the edge of space and back on the company’s primary spaceplane, called VSS Unity, in July. The flight took two test pilots and three other civilian passengers to a height of 85km above the ground and back to Earth.
If you would like to secure a ticket when it reopens to the public, you’ll have to put down a $150,000 deposit, $25,000 of which was non-refundable.
It was meant to kick off its revenue generating flights in September this year, but the Unity 23 flights was delayed after a third-party supplier “flagged a potential manufacturing defect in a component of the flight control actuation system” that it supplies to the company. Virgin Galactic opted to put the flight on hold and do inspections of its fleet to see if the defect was present in its vehicles.
