Virgin Galactic Unveils Apeiron Spacecraft as Boundless First of Its Delta Spaceship Fleet

Virgin Galactic has given its next spaceship a name drawn from ancient Greek for the boundless. Apeiron (pronounced App-Err-On) emerged from a public vote that drew thousands of responses from 83 countries across six continents. Michael Colglazier, the company’s chief executive, said the choice captures the ambition of human spaceflight and the possibilities it opens for people who share the drive to go higher.

Apeiron leads the way as the first Delta class ship to be put into service for routine commercial use after VSS Unity retired in June of last year, with a two-year hiatus as they worked on designing a craft capable of handling higher flight rates. Unity had a handful of paying passengers, flying them high for the last time in June 2024, and now the Apeiron has arrived with an extra couple of seats for six private passengers instead of the four that Unity took, which is essentially a straight up increase that allows more people to get on the plane each time.

The Apeiron takes off in a plane, Eve, and then ignites its own rocket engine, which is essentially the same flight plan that Virgin Galactic has used for years. They soar to roughly 50,000 feet with Eve carrying them, then drop off the plane and blast out above 65 miles before gliding back in to land on the runway. Delta ships were designed in a way that makes them relatively simple to create and maintain because they are built in modules, which means they can be made and repaired individually without disassembling the entire ship. The company claims that each Delta is eligible for up to 8 flights per month, which is far more than Unity managed in a typical year.

Apeiron is leaving for Spaceport America in New Mexico today on the plane Eve. Once they arrive, the engineering team will inspect the avionics software before beginning test flights. Apeiron is expected to be operational by early Q2 2027, with the second Delta ship set to launch in either Q2 or Q3 of that year. The timeline was pushed back because they needed to spend some more time getting the software in order and performing all of the checks. Now it appears that the Apeiron is the ship that will start the ball rolling on the next phase of Virgin Galactic’s activities, albeit the public has been rather keen on the name Apeiron itself.

Given all of this, people will be able to have the same suborbital experience as before, but with the added benefit of safety and the ability to repeat the experience, and now that there are more of these ships, it will be more accessible. They want to perform a lot more of this in the third quarter, as well as some scientific research and government work. We will have to wait and see what they say during their third-quarter results call in November.