Virgin Galactic is a business, and needs to be profitable to survive.
No, small businesses need to be profitable. Huge companies can easily spend decades in the red, and can even have huge market caps and be worth billions without making a penny in profit. It took Amazon 9 years to show black numbers, Uber took 15, SpaceX took 20 (but nobody can actually check). Epic turned 34 and still hasn’t shown consistent profit. There’s no need for Virgin to be profitable yet, or even at all.
There have been plenty of other spaceplanes.
All of which, with the exception of X-15, were traditional rocket-cargoes that were only “spaceplanes” in the sense that they returned as a glider.
Those rocket borne planes can reenter from orbital speed. Actually the X-15 and spaceships 1 and 2 can’t launch to very high altitude on their own either, they were all carried much of the way by a jet
At least the others get or got boosted high and fast enough by their boosters to not fall back down until they chose to
No, small businesses need to be profitable. Huge companies can easily spend decades in the red, and can even have huge market caps and be worth billions without making a penny in profit. It took Amazon 9 years to show black numbers, Uber took 15, SpaceX took 20 (but nobody can actually check). Epic turned 34 and still hasn’t shown consistent profit. There’s no need for Virgin to be profitable yet, or even at all.
All of which, with the exception of X-15, were traditional rocket-cargoes that were only “spaceplanes” in the sense that they returned as a glider.
Those rocket borne planes can reenter from orbital speed. Actually the X-15 and spaceships 1 and 2 can’t launch to very high altitude on their own either, they were all carried much of the way by a jet
At least the others get or got boosted high and fast enough by their boosters to not fall back down until they chose to