Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is going public

Richard Branson’s space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, is going public, which will make it the first publicly listed human spaceflight company.

First reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by VG, a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. is investing a mighty $800 million in the spaceflight company, which would give it a 49 percent holding.

To sweeten the deal, Social Capital Hedosophia Founder and CEO, Chamath Palihapitiya, will invest an extra $100 million and will become chairman of the merged company.

The WSJ reports that since it was founded in 2004, Virgin Galactic has already raised more than $1 billion — and that mostly came from Branson himself. The company founder notably stepped away from a proposed $1 billion investment in Virgin by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in 2018 after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Aiming to be the world’s first commercial spaceline, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is racing for the crown against two major players: Blue Origin, the space tourism company helmed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, which unveiled its ‘Blue Moon’ lunar lander in May 2019, and plans to get tourists to the moon by 2024, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which announced its first passenger flight to the moon in Feb. 2017, with the mission planned for 2023.

Virgin Galactic has launched multiple test flights of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital space planes, and in Dec. 2018, the company finally made it to the edge of space, sending the VSS Unity 51.3 miles up above Earth with two human pilots. 

They’ve been back to space since, as recently as February, but this was an especially significant moment for the company and its sister manufacturing organisation, The Spaceship Company, taking place four years since a fatal accident in the company’s first SpaceShipTwo in 2014, in which a pilot was killed, another injured, and the SS2 being tested was destroyed.

In May, Branson announced that Virgin Galactic’s development and testing program had advanced enough for the team to move from their Mojave, California location and bring all space vehicles and staff to its headquarters at Spaceport America, New Mexico as it readies for commercial service.

According to Virgin Galactic, passengers will prepare for three days at Spaceport America prior to the flight. During the trip, passengers float in zero gravity for several minutes, and “experience astounding views of Earth from the black sky of space,” from approximately 62 miles (100 kilometres) above Earth. The whole thing will be filmed for each “astronaut” as a memento.

How much? Oh, just a cheeky $250,000 per ticket. 

Virgin Galactic said it already has customer reservations from more than 600 people in 60 countries. That means around $80 million in total collected deposits and a casual $120 million of potential revenue.

Branson reportedly hopes to see Virgin Galactic’s first customers within the next few years, telling CNBC in May, “It will be something like two or three more flights before we’re actually in space.” 

Branson said in February he’d planned to fly into space himself aboard one of his company’s vehicles to mark this year’s 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch in July, but as we’re in July, this remains to be seen whether they will meet the set date.