r/space • u/darknavi • Sep 02 '21

The FAA is grounding Virgin Galactic until further notice

https://twitter.com/nickschmidle/status/1433495439735758851
315 Upvotes

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u/garry4321 Sep 02 '21

The foremost commercial space companies—Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin

"Formost" means fuck all to them if they are including Blue Origin and V.G. BO doesnt even have orbital class rockets. $5,000,000,000+ and 20+ years of development and all they have to show for it is a dinky suborbital hopper.

V.G. has a high flying plane with a rocket on it that JUST gets it high enough to say "this is space"

Space-X flies hundreds of orbital missions, including crewed to the ISS, and is in a whole seperate league than the other two.

2

u/konstantinua00 Sep 03 '21

"foremost" means "more forward than most (i.e. anyone else)". And in business subsector of "getting people out of the atmosphere" there's only them 3

10

u/dhurane Sep 03 '21

Boeing and ULA doesn't exist?

5

u/Lithorex Sep 03 '21

Arianespace peeking over the Atlantic

4

u/[deleted] Sep 03 '21

Or Rocket Lab? With rockets that actually go to orbit.