KRW 1 Billion for Just 4 Minutes of Fun... Yet 675 Line Up for 'Ultra-Luxury Travel'

Virgin Galactic's "Apeiron" to Resume Flights Next Year
675 Bookings Despite a 1 Billion Won Price per Seat

Virgin Galactic, a U.S. commercial space tourism company, has unveiled a next-generation spaceplane as it sets its sights on wealthy customers. A seat costs as much as KRW 1 billion.

Virgin Galactic has unveiled its next-generation spaceplane, “Apeiron.” Screenshot from Virgin Galactic’s website.

According to industry sources on November 1, Virgin Galactic recently unveiled Apeiron, a next-generation Delta-class spaceplane, and is working to resume commercial operations in the second quarter of 2027. A seat costs $750,000, or approximately KRW 1 billion. The experience takes six passengers to an altitude of about 87 km, where they can experience weightlessness for several minutes.

Apeiron does not launch directly into space from a runway. Its twin-fuselage carrier aircraft, VMS Eve, carries the spaceplane to an altitude of about 13.7 km before releasing it. Apeiron then ignites its own rocket engine and climbs to the edge of space. Passengers experience weightlessness for three to four minutes before gliding back to the ground.

Its maximum altitude is about 87 km. This falls short of the 100-km Karman line, widely recognized internationally as the boundary of space, but exceeds the 80-km altitude that the United States recognizes as the boundary.

The key advances in the new aircraft are its increased passenger capacity and flight frequency. The previous spaceplane, VSS Unity, carried four people, while Apeiron can carry six. Virgin Galactic also aims to reduce maintenance demands and operate each aircraft up to eight times a month, or about twice a week. That would represent a significant increase over Unity, which flew about once a month.

Apeiron is the successor to Unity, unveiled about two years and four months after Unity was retired in June 2024. On October 29, 2026, it completed its first ferry flight from a production facility in Mesa, Arizona, to Spaceport America in New Mexico. It made the trip attached to its carrier aircraft, Eve; this was not a test flight with its own rocket engine running. Virgin Galactic plans to conduct test flights before beginning commercial operations. A second aircraft is also under construction.

Virgin Galactic plans to resume commercial operations in the second quarter of next year after completing its upcoming test flights.

Screenshot of the Virgin Galactic website.

Apeiron takes its name from an ancient Greek word meaning "infinite." The name was chosen through a public vote involving thousands of people from 83 countries. When the aircraft was unveiled, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said, "We named Apeiron this morning, and this afternoon the spaceplane came home," adding, "This is a moment we have been preparing for over many years."

Despite the high price, many people are waiting to travel to space. Virgin Galactic says that, as of the end of 2025, about 675 customers had booked spaceflights. More than 100 of them had entered the preparation stage for an actual flight.

Virgin Galactic began commercial operations in 2023 and sent 23 paying passengers to space by June 2024. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also experienced space travel in 2021 aboard flights operated by the space companies they founded.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.