Virgin Galactic’s Mesa facility coming along; company hopeful commercial space flights can resume in Q2

Space tourism company Virgin Galactic (NYSE: SPCE) on Tuesday said its spacecraft manufacturing facility in Mesa is coming along and that it is on track to resume commercial service in the second quarter of this year.

Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that the company was “making progress” on the Mesa facility, which was first announced last summer as the place where its next-generation spaceships will be assembled.

The facility at 5559 S. Sossaman Road will include two buildings, bring on hundreds of employees and be able to produce six spaceships a year. Virgin will manufacture its Delta-class spaceships there, with a target to reach space in 2025 by way revenue-generating payload flights and private astronaut flights in 2026.

To that end, Virgin Galactic employees at Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, are starting to ready the facility to “safely fly ships to space on a regular basis,” Colglazier said during the earnings call. Resuming and increasing the frequency of commercial flights is the company’s focus for 2023, he said.

The highly anticipated commercial flights by the space tourism company have been beset by delays ever since its July 11, 2021 flight of the company’s SpaceShipTwo.

During an investor call just over a year ago, Colglazier said Virgin Galactic was “on track and on schedule” to begin commercial service in the fourth quarter of 2022 and announced that at least 750 flight reservations were sold. But just months later, the company further pushed its commercial flight timeframe to the first quarter of 2023.

Colglazier on Tuesday said that upgrades to the company’s mothership, called VMS Eve, took longer than originally planned. Those upgrades, now complete, included installing new stabilizers and replacing the ship’s launch pylon.

VMS Eve flew to New Mexico’s Spaceport America on Monday after completing some mechanical upgrades at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Southern California. The flight came nearly two weeks after the aircraft flew for the first time since 2021 in Mojave, Calif.

Colglazier told investors that the company is “very pleased” with how the VMS Eve has performed during flights.

The company plans to run a series of test flights with the VMS Eve and its VSS Unity, the aircraft that will carry customers to the upper limits of the atmosphere. Those tests include a glide flight — Eve will carry Unity into the upper atmosphere before releasing it to glide back — as well as a powered flight. Those flights are designed to validate the performance of both aircraft, Colglazier said on the call.