Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.
SPCE 5.91%
is planning to expand its fleet of space vehicles in an effort to boost the number of flights it operates within a few years.
The company founded by billionaire entrepreneur
Richard Branson
captured global attention a year ago when it completed a flight to the edge of space with Mr. Branson and five others aboard its spacecraft.
The company hasn’t operated another voyage since then as it improves its current fleet. One competitor,
Jeff Bezos’s
Blue Origin LLC, has conducted four suborbital flights after launching Mr. Bezos and three others on a company rocket last July.
Virgin Galactic said Thursday it agreed to open a factory in Arizona where staff would assemble spaceships. Last week, it said it hired a subsidiary of
Boeing Co.
to manufacture two additional planes the company would use for future missions.
Virgin Galactic’s vehicles are designed to take people to the edge of space by mounting a spaceship onto a twin-fuselage plane. The plane takes off with the spaceship attached, and the ship—carrying the crew members—is released at around 50,000 feet in the air and rockets to space.
The spaceship flight by Virgin Galactic last summer took Richard Branson and fellow passengers to the edge of space.
Photo:
Virgin Galactic/Shutterstock
For the first quarter, Virgin Galactic reported a net loss of about $93 million. Shares rose about 6% Friday to $7.35, down from $33.07 about a year ago, according to FactSet.
The planned Arizona factory is expected to be fully operational toward the end of next year and offer the ability to produce up to six spaceships a year, the company said. By late 2025, the first of those ships are expected to be available for revenue-generating flights, with private-astronaut missions starting in 2026, Virgin Galactic added.
Expanding the fleet of spaceships is key for “enabling a rapid increase in flight capacity that will drive our revenue growth,” Chief Executive
Michael Colglazier
said Thursday. The company previously said the first new “mothership”—the twin-fuselage plane that carries the spaceship—is expected to be ready in 2025 as well.
Virgin Galactic executives have said the company has been working to improve the durability and reliability of its current fleet, and now plans to restart commercial service in the first quarter of next year.
Mr. Colglazier said in May the company pushed back its planned restart of flight activity from late 2022 because of supply-chain and labor challenges.
He said then the company was seeing strong demand for its product offerings, and had about 800 future astronaut reservations.
Write to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com
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