The Spaceship Company

The Spaceship Company (TSC) is a spacecraft and aircraft manufacturer founded in mid-2005 by Burt Rutan and Richard Branson to build and own the vehicles flown by Virgin Galactic, separating manufacturing from Virgin Galactic's flight-operations business.

Based at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California, TSC became a wholly owned Virgin Galactic subsidiary in 2012 after Virgin bought out Scaled Composites' stake, and it subsequently took over production and flight testing of SpaceShipTwo-class suborbital spaceplanes and their WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft from Scaled Composites, which had built the original SpaceShipTwo, VSS Enterprise (lost in a fatal 2014 test-flight accident).

TSC built and tested VSS Unity, VSS Imagine and related vehicles, and the carrier aircraft VMS Eve, supporting Virgin Galactic's commercial suborbital tourism flights, which began in 2023 and carried paying customers and researchers from Spaceport America, New Mexico. The company has also pursued supersonic aircraft work, partnering with Boom Technology from 2016 on the XB-1 demonstrator aircraft. In 2024 Virgin Galactic paused active flight operations of the Unity-class spaceplane and shifted TSC's manufacturing effort toward larger, more production-friendly Delta-class vehicles intended for commercial service later in the decade.

The Spaceship Company remains active as Virgin Galactic's in-house manufacturing arm, based in Mojave, California, with additional facilities reported in Tustin, California.