The last, best hope for space tourism just rolled onto a runway in Arizona

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.

“We’re proud that the lead ship in Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship fleet will carry a name chosen by the people who share our excitement for what comes next,” said Michael Colglazier, chief executive officer of Virgin Galactic.

But more significantly, the company said Apeiron would be moved from its Spaceship Factory in Mesa, Arizona, to Spaceport America in New Mexico later on Wednesday.

Apeiron won’t be making a free flight anytime soon. After being carried to New Mexico by the VMS Eve, aircraft engineers and technicians there will complete work on the vehicle’s avionics equipment and flight software. Following additional ground tests, Apeiron will be mated again to Eve for captive carry tests, followed by a drop test and ultimately a powered test flight above 80 km.

Is this the future of space tourism?

Presently, the company is saying it now expects Apeiron’s first commercial spaceflight to take place “early” in the second quarter of 2027. As with every other projected date in aerospace, this should be taken with a grain of salt. But it seems plausible that Apeiron may begin flying paying customers on suborbital space tourism missions over the next 12 to 18 months.

There is considerable skepticism about the commercial viability of Virgin Galactic’s space tourism ambitions. Success will require its vehicles to fly nearly flawlessly and with unprecedented durability to bring hundreds of people to space each year briefly. As this reality has dawned on investors, the markets have not been kind to the company in recent years. In 2021, at the height of space tourism euphoria, the company’s stock briefly reached a stratospheric valuation of $1,118 a share. More recently it has been trading in the vicinity $2.50 a share.

Whatever you might think of Virgin Galactic, however, it seems clear that any hopes of expanding the aperture of space tourism in the next decade will be flying beneath its wings.

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