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The private space tourism era looked so very promising five years ago. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic had begun flying customers—real people with zero space experience—on suborbital missions. And at about the same time, private citizens were going to orbit for days at a time aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. But that was then. Consider the state of play today: - It has been 10 months since Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft flew its last mission in January. The program was subsequently “paused,” but let’s be real. Blue Origin has moved on. New Shepard’s engineering teams are now supporting the New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lander programs. - SpaceX flew its final free-flyer mission on Dragon, Fram2, in April 2025. A handful of non-NASA missions bound for space stations remain on the spacecraft’s manifest, but all are likely to carry at least one government astronaut. Then Dragon will be retired. There is no credible timeline for SpaceX’s Starship to fly humans into space from Earth. - As for Virgin Galactic, the company flew its final suborbital mission on the VSS Unity spacecraft more than two years ago, in June 2024. So we are now 10 months, and counting, without a space tourism mission in the United States. Hello Apeiron, you shiny object At the time of Unity‘s final flight, Virgin Galactic said it was moving on to the second generation of its suborbital spacecraft. It planned to bring two of these Delta-class ships into service by the year 2026. Of course, it is now 2026, and there are no Delta-class ships in service. But apparently we are getting closer to that goal. On Wednesday, the first Delta-class ship received a name: Apeiron. According to Virgin Galactic’s news release, the name is drawn from the ancient Greek concept of the boundless, which is an interesting choice for a vehicle that will forever be bound by Earth’s gravity. It was chosen through a public vote.
document fetched 2026-10-29 03:02 · canonical https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/the-last-best-hope-for-space-tourism-just-rolled-onto-a-runway-in-arizona