After nearly two decades of development, Virgin Galactic made its first commercial suborbital flight with SpaceShipTwo on June 29. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity departed its main vehicle, VMS Eve, in cloudy skies over southern New Mexico at approximately 11:29 PM ET. The vehicles left Spaceport America at 10:30 am EST.

Unity fired its hybrid rocket engine for about 60 seconds on a mission called Galactic 01. It reached a maximum altitude of 85.1 kilometers before landing on the spaceport runway at 11:43 pm ET.

The Galactic 01 mission was a research flight for the Italian Air Force and the Italian National Research Council. Virgin Galactic and the Italian Air Force signed a flight contract in October 2019, agreeing to send three Italian payload specialists on a special research flight.

The mission, designated Virtute 1 by the Italian government, involved Colonel Walter Villaday and Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Landolfi of the Italian Air Force, and Pantaleone Carlucci of the Italian National Research Council. During the mission, the three planned to conduct 13 experiments ranging from biomedical data collection to microgravity studies of fluid mechanics and combustion.

Also on board was Colin Bennett, a Virgin Galactic astronaut instructor who had previously flown aboard VSS Unity in 2021. Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic’s vice president of government relations and research operations, said in an interview in June that the vehicle was flown to observe the research environment in-flight and “make a holistic assessment of the research mission so that we can continually improve the experience.” 28.

VSS Unity was piloted by Mike Mazzucci, who made his fourth space flight, and Nicola Pechile, a former Italian Air Force pilot who is now on his first spaceflight with Virgin.

In September 2004, company founder Richard Branson announced plans for Virgin Galactic, shortly before SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for a pair of suborbital flights from the Mojave Aerospace Port. Virgin Galactic is licensing SpaceShipOne technology from vehicle developer Scaled Composites and sponsor Paul Allen for a larger vehicle that can carry six passengers.

At the time, Virgin Galactic was planning to begin commercial service as early as 2007. However, the development of the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft and SpaceShipTwo, now called VMS Eve, took much longer than expected. The company also lost SpaceShipTwo’s first vehicle, the VSS Enterprise, in a test flight crash in October 2014 that killed Scaled Composites pilot Mike Alsbury.

The company looked set to begin commercial service in 2021 with Unity 22 flight, which Branson flew with several Virgin Galactic employees in July. An Italian Air Force flight was scheduled that fall, followed by a maintenance period for both VMS Eve and VSS Unity. However, in October 2021 Virgin decided to start this maintenance period earlier and delayed its flight to Italy.

Virgin Galactic resumed test flights of VSS Unity this spring, including the May 25 flight of the spacecraft, called Unity 25, the spacecraft’s first suborbital spaceflight since Unity 22. After Unity 25, the company said it was ready to begin commercial service with Galactic Flight 01. At the time, the company said it would run a series of dedicated astronaut missions each month after Galactic 01, serving about 800 people who have signed up to date. The first of these, Galactic 02, is scheduled for early August.