"WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo take to the skies." -- Virgin Galactic, 7:30 a.m. EST, Dec. 13, 2018
"SpaceShipTwo, welcome to space." -- 8:02 a.m. EST
"Wheel stop, SpaceShipTwo. Welcome back to Earth." -- 8:15 a.m. EST
From its first tweet announcing takeoff to the last tweet confirming mission success, it took Virgin Galactic just 30 tweets, and 45 minutes, to go from Earth to space and back again.
When it did this, Virgin Galactic -- Sir Richard Branson's pioneering air-launched rocket company -- became the first U.S.-based space company to carry humans to space since the end of the Space Shuttle program seven years ago. After piggybacking on its WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) mothership to an altitude of eight miles, SpaceShipTwo (SS2) detached and ignited its rocket engine, ultimately topping out at 51.4 miles high. SS2 fell short of crossing the 62-miles-up Karman line, but reached the more lenient U.S. Air Force definition of "space," which counts anything 50 miles above the Earth's surface or higher.
In so doing, Virgin Galactic proved: It's now got a spaceship capable of carrying paying tourists to space -- at $250,000 a head.
With $250,000 and a little patience, you, too, could view Earth from an orbiting SpaceShipTwo in just a few months. Image source: Virgin Galactic.
Step 1: Make some money
Virgin Galactic noted that this month's mission marked SS2's "first revenue-generating flight," because the test vehicle carried four payloads on-board for NASA. The amount of revenue recorded must have been small, though, because Virgin didn't bother to mention how much it earned. Thus the great prize for Virgin Galactic -- paying customers -- still remains to be won.
Step 2: Make some more
With seating for eight -- two crew, and six paying passengers -- and a $250,000 ticket price, SS2 should be capable of generating $1.5 million per flight once commercial space tourism flights begin. And such flights could begin sooner than you think.
Commenting on this month's flight, Virgin founder Richard Branson told CNBC he expects to run at least three more test flights before commercial operations begin. Branson himself plans to go up on one of these test flights "some time in the middle of next year." And then, "quite soon after that the public will go up."
Taken as a whole, therefore, this appears to add up to a promise that commercial space tourism flights will begin sometime after June 2019.
Step 3: Earn that money
Virgin Galactic has already built up a big backlog of ticket-holders to go on those flights. Some 700 people have prepaid the $250,000 cost of a ride on SS2. On one hand, that's a downside -- it means there's $175 million in revenue that Virgin Galactic still needs to earn by delivering its promised service, creating urgency to get the business up and running.