ORLANDO, Fla. — Virgin Galactic is working with Redwire to produce payload racks for experiments flying on its Delta-class suborbital spaceplane in development.
Virgin announced Jan. 30 it was partnering with Redwire on the research payload lockers that can be installed on the Delta-class vehicles to support a wide range of experiments. The lockers will be based on equipment that Redwire has built for use in orbit on the International Space Station.
“We’re leveraging everything we have learned in our 35 years of outfitting crewed spacecraft to develop these lockers,” John Vellinger, president of in-space industries at Redwire, in a statement. “Virgin Galactic’s Delta spaceships bring to market a new capability that expands the opportunities for commercial space innovation.”
Virgin Galactic has conducted research on some flights of its VSS Unity suborbital vehicle. That included a dedicated research flight for the Italian Air Force on Unity’s first commercial mission, Galactic 01, in June 2023, and two researchers who flew another Unity mission in November 2023.
Sirisha Bandla, vice president of research operations at Virgin Galactic, said in an interview that the Delta-class vehicles will follow the same modular approach as Unity, where a seat can be replaced by a payload rack carrying four lockers. The new lockers will include improvements to make it easier for researchers.
“Our new lockers are being designed to be much more plug-and-play than our past lockers, and we’re utilizing Redwire’s experience in orbital microgravity research for that,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is take out as much engineering for our customers as possible, so that what they really need to do is just bring their sensors and their experiment to put into these lockers.”
The lockers will support both autonomous and human-tended experiments. They will also feature real-time data transmission to the ground, which was not available for payload flying on Unity, she said.
The design of the lockers fits into a broader strategy by proponents of suborbital spaceflight research, who see it as part of a pipeline that starts with drop towers and parabolic aircraft flights that offer seconds of microgravity, through suborbital vehicles that offer minutes of microgravity, and on to orbital platforms like the ISS.
“We’ve always touted suborbital as critical to de-risking technologies that go to orbit,” Bandla said, something that working with Redwire enables by leveraging its experience with orbital research payloads. “It’s much easier for suborbital researchers to then take their payloads and fly them in other orbital destinations.”
She said Virgin was continuing to see strong interest in suborbital research. That interest started with scientists who are already familiar with flying payloads in space but has since grown to scientists interested in how microgravity can assist their research. “It’s really being driven not only by our capabilities, but also by the community being excited about our capabilities.”
That interest has not lagged even with the hiatus in flights by Virgin Galactic, which ended Unity missions in June 2024 to focus its resources on developing the Delta-class vehicles that are scheduled to start flying commercially in 2026. Research papers from those earlier flights are now being published, she said, triggering new interest.
“We’re seeing researchers that want to do research in microgravity, but they’re not rocket scientists, they’re not aerospace engineers,” she said. “This is the complexity we’re trying to take out to allow scientists to not have to go partner with an engineer to fly something in space.”
