CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Virgin Galactic, a U.S. offshoot of Richard Branson's Virgin Group, joined two separate teams vying for a $200 million NASA program to spur the development of private-sector space taxis, the company said on Thursday.
The teams, led by Orbital Sciences Corp. and Sierra Nevada Corp., both propose flying passengers on reusable winged spaceships that launch on expendable rockets and land on runways like NASA's space shuttles. These designs "could revolutionize orbital space flight in much the same way that SpaceShipTwo has revolutionized suborbital space flight," Virgin said in a statement, referring to the first of a fleet of suborbital commercial spaceships being developed by Scaled Composites.
Virgin is selling tickets to ride the six-passenger, two-pilot SpaceShipTwo, named Enterprise, for $200,000, and plans to begin flight services in about a year. The company has collected more than $54 million in deposits from 400 customers, Virgin Galactic said.
Orbital and Sierra Nevada are among at least four firms competing for the next round of funding in NASA's Commercial Crew Development program. The other bidders include Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, and Boeing. Privately owned SpaceX on December 8 successfully flew the cargo version of its Dragon capsule, which NASA is supporting under a separate development effort.
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