They were dragging their feet. But now they’ve redoubled their efforts, and soon it will be fully functional.
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What going to be interesting about this flight is, if successful, it’s going to put Virgin Galactic in a bit of a pickle.
I guess it depends on what the cost ends up being, but you get a longer flight here vs Virgin Galactic, and no pilot needed. I wonder which is cheaper to fly.
My partner and I very very much want to see orbit before we expire from this planet. If Blue Origin/Virgin Galactic, and to a lesser extent SpaceX begin price competition to make that a remote possibility for the average joe a few decades from now, than I’m all for it. A ride to orbit that didn’t cost as much as a house would be an amazing bucket-list item to cross off for us.
I’m surprised by that, too - Musk specifically won’t go to space/mars for precisely this reason.
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Jeff Bezos be like:
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I was under the impression this was why he was stepping down as CEO?
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Well, tbf, all our modern passenger spaceships today are automated. Soyuz, Dragon, Starliner, Orion – all fully autonomous robots.
The only possible exception is VG’s Spaceship Two (assuming you’ll accept 82km as “outer space”), and that’s one of the (several) reasons you couldn’t pay me to ride it. They’re old-school stick-and-rudder guys, and they feel that using trained pilots is both quicker and safer than developing complex, complicated software.
And their entire design is constrained by that. The bizarre fold-up “shuttlecock re-entry mode” is needed because human pilots can’t fly a spaceplane through a hypersonic re-entry interface - they’re just not quick enough. So they needed a “passively stable” re-entry mode.
Of course, VG has already had one fatal crash due to pilot error, so their “safer than a robot” theory strikes me as rather dubious.
I’d much rather be “spam in a can” and let the clever robots do the flying, myself.
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Yeah! Aren’t those usually red not blue?!
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Probably not. Blue has been working toward this flight for some time, and its time has come in the natural order of things.
But bear in mind that Blue was only the Prime Contractor on the National Team. Partners included Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin, both of whom know a bit about orbital launch. 
I dunno - New Shepard has been putting stuff into space for six years now. Flying a reusable rocket and reusable booster to (usually) above the 100 km Karman line, they’ve made 15 flights using two capsules and three boosters. All robots — no pilots needed.
This will just be the first time that live human passengers have ridden it. But it’s been flying to space for years.
Soft cheese for me, but each their own.
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They’ve been putting stuff into space for awhile now.
They’re just not tied to stock that needs manipulatin’ like Elon is.
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Is he taking his hairless cat and miniature clone?
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How important is the “orbit” part of that dream of yours? Because only SpaceX has a vehicle that can get to orbit, vs a quick vertical hop. I’m not even sure if Virgin Galactic even has aspirations to make a vehicle that can go to orbit. It certainly wouldn’t be very similar to their current design.
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“Alexa, play Whitey on the Moon.”
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