CEO Michael Colglazier talks about building a consumer space brand
Commercial human spaceflight company Virgin Galactic has unveiled the first-ever Spaceship III, the third major iteration of its spacecraft design. The first in this new series is called “VSS (Virgin SpaceShip) Imagine,” and will start ground testing now with the aim of beginning its first glide flights starting this summer. VSS Imagine has a snazzy new external look, including a mirrored wraparound finish that’s designed to reflect the spacecraft’s changing environment as it makes its way from the ground to space — but more importantly, it moves Virgin Galactic closer to achieving the engineering goals it requires to produce a fleet of spacecraft at scale.
I spoke to Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier about VSS Imagine, and what it represents for the company.
“We can build these at a faster pace,” he explained. “These are still relatively slow, versus what we want in our next class of spaceships. But what we do expect to have here is, we’ve taken all the learnings from [VSS] Unity, and built-in what we need to do so that we can turn these ships at a faster pace, because obviously, the number of flights we can do is the product of how many ships you have, and how quickly you can turn them.”
Continue reading… “Virgin Galactic debuts its first third-generation spaceship, ‘VSS Imagine’”
