How two million Virgin Points can get you a trip to space on Virgin Galactic

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Virgin Galactic is progressing with its plans to make commercial space flights a reality. As you may have seen in the newspapers over the weekend, another successful test flight has just been completed.

VSS Unity, the oldest vessel in the fleet – if you ignore the one that crashed in 2014 – is the one which is currently undertaking the test flights. VSS Imagine – the second vessel, built to a new more efficient design – was delivered in March 2021 and a third vessel is under construction.

The first passenger flight may take place at the end of this year. There is, apparently, one more test flight to go which will carry Virgin Galactic staff to simulate actual passengers, and the flight after that will carry Sir Richard Branson and the first paying guests.

Those who registered and paid in advance were charged $250,000. Once services are operational, the company states that the fare will be higher.

If you consider $250,000 too much, your miles might help you get closer to a flight. As you can see on this Virgin Atlantic page, you can use your Virgin Points for a ticket.

How many Virgin Points do you need to go into space?

2,000,000.

It isn’t that straightforward either.

Only one ticket is available for a Virgin Points redemption. You need to ring Flying Club to register your interest and, once commercial flights are bookable, Flying Club will randomly pick a winner. No miles will be taken from your account until that point.

Importantly, this offer is only available to members who have earned two million miles from Virgin Atlantic flights, not from partner activity. Transferring American Express points won’t cut it.

Two years ago, you could get a discount on a Virgin Galactic flight by using your miles. 200,000 Virgin Points got you a 10% discount, which was exceptionally good value. This offer is no longer available, unfortunately.

If you’re interested, you can learn how to register your interest on this page of the Virgin Atlantic website.

How to earn Virgin Points from UK credit cards (December 2021)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Virgin Points from UK credit cards. Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses.

You can choose from two official Virgin Atlantic credit cards (apply here, one has a bonus of 15,000 points):

Virgin Atlantic Reward Mastercard

The UK’s most generous free Visa or Mastercard at 0.75 points / £1 Read our full review

Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard

15,000 points bonus and the most generous non-Amex for day to day spending Read our full review

You can also earn Virgin Points from various American Express cards – and these have sign-up bonuses too.

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold is FREE for a year and comes with 20,000 Membership Rewards points, which convert into 20,000 Virgin Points:

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 20,000 points, FREE for a year & two airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express comes with 30,000 Membership Rewards points, which convert into 30,000 Virgin Points:

The Platinum Card from American Express

30,000 points and an unbeatable set of travel benefits – for a fee Read our full review

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Virgin Points.

(Want to earn more Virgin Points? Click here to see our recent articles on Virgin Atlantic and Flying Club and click here for our home page with the latest news on earning and spending other airline and hotel points.)

Category

Virgin Atlantic and Flying Club

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

BJ says:

24 May24 May 06:31

Highway to heaven perhaps.
Alice says:

24 May24 May 07:34

Is space on the red list?
- BJ says:
  
  24 May24 May 08:00
  
  Only Mars…
  - Si says:
    
    24 May24 May 09:34
    
    Excellent dad joke.
Froggee says:

24 May24 May 08:13

Is this why Rob didn’t transfer out his Virgin points when everyone else was panicking!?
- Peter K says:
  
  24 May24 May 17:07
  
  His aren’t from flying.
  - meta says:
    
    24 May24 May 19:39
    
    His wife might be.
will says:

24 May24 May 09:31

Pretty strange world when we’re trading out fossil fuels for renewables yet we’re enthusiastic about wealthy people burning (presumably a lot of) carbon to have a tourist trip to nowhere.

Each to their own but I’ve never really understood the obsession with this. If it actually went somewhere I’d get it.
- Mike says:
  
  24 May24 May 09:42
  
  Since wealthy people will fly across the Atlantic first class to attend an environmental protest, hypocrisy tend to be the order of the day.
- Barry cutters says:
  
  24 May24 May 10:00
  
  One would argue that the development of space travel and furthering the human race in this field (funded by wealthy peoples tourist trips) is worth the relatively small , in comparison to total global emissions , amount of C02 caused by this .
  
  ‘Doing things’ is how we progress to be able to do things cheaper , more efficiently and become better at doing them .
  
  I’m no expert but I would suggest that 100years of motor car development means the original model t Ford was much less efficient than the current modern day Ford equivalent .
  - Colonel Blimp says:
    
    24 May24 May 11:09
    
    Given its relatively unstable and infinitely more dangerous than most modes of transport, perhaps we could nominate a Hfp contributor to be blasted into space for a one way trip. Excluding myself of course the more egocentric, boring and wealthy the better 🙂
  - Mr. AC says:
    
    24 May24 May 20:57
    
    Indeed. Tourism is one of the things that will make developing space sustainable in the short term. Developing space is what will help decarbonize our industries and save the planet long term (space-based solar energy production, fuel for fusion if we figure it out, space based resource extraction etc). Carbon “investment” here is well worth it.
- Reney says:
  
  24 May24 May 11:14
  
  I thought space craft tends to use a lot of liquid hydrogen as fuel which doesn’t produce CO2. But that is just part of the process. There will be Co2 produced when making all the parts etc.
Magic Mike says:

24 May24 May 09:50

Only suborbital though… and you can get six minutes of weightlessness for EUR 6k with ZeroG…
The Savage Squirrel says:

24 May24 May 13:33

“Importantly, this offer is only available to members who have earned two million miles from Virgin Atlantic flights, not from partner activity”

I was genuinely interested until this bit 😀
- CarpalTravel says:
  
  24 May24 May 14:36
  
  I’d be genuinely interested to know how many people even have 2+million miles for them to decide that they need to add this as a condition. I must be really slacking given my measly 300k that I have accrued over the last 5 years mostly via this method.
Alex B says:

24 May24 May 13:54

Any indication of how many people have entered?
- Rob says:
  
  24 May24 May 14:34
  
  No – this has been running for a few years though!
Gavin says:

24 May24 May 15:23

I was pretty excited about this project back in about 2005. They’ve put a 1-2 year timescale on the first commercial flight so many times (must be almost every year beginning about 2009), I’ll be very surprised if they begin commercial operations within the year, or even the next 5.