Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic problem

Ladies and gentlemen, please make sure your seat belt is securely fastened and your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position. Richard Branson will this week once again blast his Virgin rocket ship into space. Although not really, because at best his sub-orbital ship will only get to the edge of space, and only for a few moments, before gliding back to Earth.

Galactic 03, on 8 September, will be the company’s third commercial flight after a successful mission in August and will carry three as-yet-unnamed passengers who bought their tickets on the company’s space plane back in the 2000s. ‘Space is Virgin territory,’ boasts Branson, who flew himself on an earlier test flight. But he is not exactly going where no man has gone before. 

Branson’s project has suffered years of delay and catastrophe. In 2014, a test pilot was killed when an experimental flight suffered a catastrophic breakup during a test flight and crashed in the Mojave Desert.