Virgin Galactic is set to launch its first space tourism flight on Thursday, marking the beginning of a new era of commercial space travel as companies compete for market share.

The company, known for its high-flying plans for monthly commercial trips to space, offers seats on its flights for $450,000 a head.

After completing its first commercial space flight in June, the company is sending the first round of tourists into orbit, joining Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, which sent the Amazon founder and a group of travelers into orbit in 2021.

SpaceX, the project of billionaire Elon Musk, has also conducted tourist flights to destinations like the international space station, sending three wealthy businessmen there in 2022.

The Virgin Galactic launch is scheduled from New Mexico’s Spaceport America, the first spaceport built for commercial purposes, and is scheduled for 11 a.m. on Thursday. Virgin Galactic also plans to stream the event on its website.

Aboard the flight will be a British Olympic canoeist, Jon Goodwin, who will be the first Olympian in space and, at 80 years old, one of the oldest people to visit.

“For me to go to space and defy Parkinson’s,” Mr. Goodwin said in a Virgin Galactic promotional video, “is hopefully inspirational to all people.”

A mother and her daughter, Keisha Schahaff and Anastatia Mayers, will also be aboard and will become the first people from the Caribbean to go to space.

Ms. Schahaff is a wellness coach from Antigua and Barbuda. Her daughter, Ms. Mayers, 18, will be one of the youngest people to go to space. She studies at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and hopes to become an astrobiologist.

“When I was 2 years old, just looking up into the skies, I was like, How can I get there?” M. Schahaff said in a promotional video.

The flight will travel 50 miles above New Mexico before a shuttle carrying the passengers and crew detaches from a so-called mothership and is allowed to return to Earth separately.

Virgin Galactic’s entry into the commercial and tourist spaceflight field marks a new era of competition between the three major commercial spaceflight players.

Compared to SpaceX, Virgin Galactic’s tickets, at $450,000, are a bargain. The four people that SpaceX sent to the space station paid $55 million each.

The lower price tag appears to be working for Virgin Galactic, which reports having sold 800 tickets as of the end of last year, which will translate into $207 million in future revenue, according to the company’s latest annual report.

This is future revenue that the company is going to need. In the first quarter of 2023, Virgin Galactic reported a net loss of $159 million. In the third quarter of 2022 the company had posted a net loss of $93.1 million, signaling increasingly treacherous financial waters.

In the past year the company has spent more than $566 million and is on track to potentially run out within two years. Thursday’s flight has the potential to be a windfall for the company in terms of proof of the company’s long-term viability.