An article in the British newspaper The Independent last week about Richard Branson’s new climate prize mentioned that Branson risks being branded a hypocrite because his ownership of a fossil fuel-burning airline and “for setting up a company, Virgin Galactica, that intends to use the aircraft technology that won the X-prize to build up a space tourism industry where individual tickets for a 90-second ride in space will cost £100,000 each - as well as burning thousands of gallons of rocket fuel.” Wait a sec: Virgin Galactica? Must have been a random typo. However, a companion piece by the same author also uses the “Virgin Galactica” name twice in the same paragraph. Has Virgin Galactic changed its name, perhaps in a bid to ride the popularity of the TV show Battlestar Galactica?

The answer is almost certainly no: the company’s web site still uses the Virgin Galactic name, and that’s how the company was identifying itself as recently as last week at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference. Still, it’s amusing to see that the two Independent articles aren’t the only times an “a” has been appended to the end of Virgin Galactic’s name. A search turns up a couple of other examples in the last month: an article in the University of Cincinnati newspaper, The News-Record, about a visit to campus by former NASA Ames director Scott Hubbard, who was quoted as saying “Privately funded rockets are being made … such as Virgin Galactica”; and a Fox News article, since pulled from the web, that mentioned in passing that Stephen Hawking announced “his plans to tour space in 2009 aboard one of Richard Branson’s planned Virgin Galactica space flights.”