Nearly two years since Virgin Galactic’s last space flight, the company will once again take regular citizens up into space — regular citizens who have an extra $750,000, that is. It began accepting online reservations on Monday, with a price tag substantially higher than the $600,000 it charged for trips in 2023.

The next expeditions will take place aboard the company’s new Delta Class craft, which can hold six passengers (up from four) and can fly twice per week. Virgin Galactic said it will test the new ship this summer and will begin commercial trips in the fall. The first flights will be for research to gather data for how the ship performs, and then passenger flights will begin 6 to 8 weeks after those research expeditions, the company said.

If all goes as planned, the first nonresearch passengers could be flying into space before the end of the year, the company said.

The company will sell 50 tickets at $750,000 each, then pause sales after all are sold. The company will «step our pricing up as we go» when sales resume, CEO Michael Colglazier said during the company’s earnings call earlier this week. He said they have not settled on future ticket prices.

A representative for Virgin Galactic told CNET that the company will not announce how many of those 50 tickets have been sold so far or who the customers are.

Lots of folks are waiting

Virgin Galactic won’t only be taking up new customers to space. There is a backlog of 675 people, who the company calls their «founding astronauts» or «future astronauts» — people who paid deposits as long as a decade ago for future flights. Because they paid years ago, their trip costs will be much lower than those of people buying tickets now.

Future flights could include both new customers and these founding astronauts from that backlog.

Virgin Galactic’s goal, Colglazier said, is to take 10 trips per month by 2027. That would be about 60 passengers per month.

A substantial investment has been made in space tourism, albeit by a handful of companies, since engineer and entrepreneur Dennis Tito became the first «space tourist» in 2001. Virgin Galactic has taken 23 customers into space, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has flown 98, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX has taken 20. Axiom Space and Space Adventures — the pioneering company that took Tito up — have taken several customers to the International Space Station.

The space tourism market is forecast to grow from $2.3 billion in 2026 to $47 billion by 2034, an annual increase of 45%, «for leisure, exploration, and experiential travel beyond Earth’s atmosphere,» according to research firm Fortune Business Insights.

The Virgin Galactic news comes on the same day that NASA will launch its first human flight to the moon since 1972. Four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — will fly the Orion spacecraft around the moon, but not land on it, during the 10-day mission. CNET offers live updates and the live stream for the launch.

Virgin Galactic’s last flight was Galactic 07 on June 8, 2024, on the VSS Unity, its first craft. That was the final trip of a 12-flight mission before the company began setting its sights on developing its Delta Class ships for longer customer trips. Multibillionaire Richard Branson, who founded the company in 2004, took his inaugural flight on July 11, 2021.

‘Shockingly thin blue line’

Ron Rosano, from San Rafael, California, fulfilled a lifelong dream with his Virgin Galactic trip in 2023. He recalls his three minutes of weightlessness and the g-forces from the ship’s rocket firing.

Rosano told CNET he remembers «the view of this incredible, miraculous planet floating suspended in the empty black vastness of space, seeing the shockingly thin blue line of our atmosphere on the edge of the planet. Sadly, the idea that we humans are suspended in gravity orbiting the sun on a spaceship, a spaceship Earth, does not sit very much at all in our consciousness.»

Virgin Galactic flights reach as high as 50 miles above Earth’s surface, a distance recognized by both the FAA and USAF as the boundary of outer space. That altitude is below the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, which is about 62 miles above the Earth.

A carrier aircraft named the VMS Eve (after Branson’s mother) will take off, bring the Delta Class spaceship to about 45,000 feet, and then release it for its journey to space. The spaceship will then return to Earth on its own.