Virgin Galactic has made its fifth suborbital test flight and may soon start sending tourists into space. It was the first launch by the company since 2021, when founder Richard Branson went into orbit, Space reports.. com.

“We think if all goes well, we will be ready for our first commercial flight in June,” Mike Moses, president of space missions and security at Virgin Galactic, said ahead of the launch..

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VMS Eve carrier aircraft with VSS Unity spacecraft launched from New Mexico. When the plane reached an altitude of 15 thousand meters, a spacecraft separated from it, which turned on its own engines and reached an altitude of 87.2 kilometers, reaching a speed of Mach 2.94.

The passengers of the spacecraft experienced a state of weightlessness for a short time, and were also able to see the Earth against the backdrop of the darkness of space..

In total, there were eight people on board both vehicles, all of them employees of Virgin Galactic..

In 2026, the company plans to commission a new generation of aircraft, after which it hopes to launch tourists into space every day.. The ticket price for one passenger will be 450 thousand dollars.

Virgin Galactic's Unity-22 spacecraft made its first flight with passengers on July 11, 2021.. On board was Richard Branson.. The flight did not go smoothly: in the last stages of climb, a signal lit up on the instrument panel of the ship, which warned that during the descent the ship would leave the space allocated to it by the flight program and that it would have to make an emergency landing. However, the pilots quickly corrected course, and Unity successfully completed the flight.. The vessel was outside the planned descent trajectory for 101 seconds.