NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 28: Sir Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Galactic, poses for photographs ... [+]
Virgin Galactic (SPCE:NYSE) blasted off on Valentine’s Day 2020, rising more than 21% to a 52-week high despite a falling stock market. The company was founded in 2004 by Sir Richard Branson (#478 on the Forbes billionaire list with $4 billion) and has yet to earn a profit.
Why did the stock rocket upward? The company made a three-hour positioning flight. It flew its passenger spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, from Mojave Airport in California to its commercial headquarters, at Spaceport America’s Gateway to Space building in New Mexico.
But the simple flight was, as the company puts it with its typical flair, “another vital step on its path to commercial service.”
The transfer of the spacecraft to its long-promised Spaceport America base is indeed a big step in the company’s 15-year journey to credibility. Typical of the company’s history of hype is its exciting website. It opens with a little aircraft flying over the desert and suddenly belching rocket fire, along with video of an astronaut at the controls of a vibrating spaceship.
The product has been pre-sold to more than 600 would-be space tourists in 60 countries who have put down deposits on future flights.
Virgin Galactic Founder Sir Richard Branson demonstrates a spacewear system, designed for Virgin ... [+]
But before Virgin Galactic reached orbit in the stock market in October of 2019 through a reverse-merger maneuver, it suffered a well-publicized series of reverses and controversies that might have derailed another company.
The opportunity to build the Spaceport, for example, was won by New Mexico in a bidding war with California. But with more than $250 million in New Mexico taxpayer money spent, the spaceport was largely unused for years. As the Atlantic put it in 2018, “Although the spaceport has been flight-worthy since 2010, the first launch by its anchor tenant, Virgin Galactic, still hasn’t taken off.”
Of course, the biggest setback was the tragic 2014 crash of the original SpaceShipTwo on a test flight, which killed one pilot and injured another. The spacecraft was destroyed. But with more than a billion in capital raised from the likes of Abu Dhabi and Boeing, among others, Virgin Galactic soldiered on. This week’s transfer of the spacecraft was indeed a major milestone for the company.
On the flight, the carrier aircraft, VMS Eve (named for founder Sir Richard Branson’s mother) ferried SpaceShipTwo,(aka VSS Unity) out of Mojave, where Virgin Galactic’s manufacturing and test facilities are based. (Virgin says the building of two additional spacecraft is well underway in Mojave.) The paired aircraft landed at 15:49MT, where Virgin says they were greeted by an enthusiastic group of teammates who will operate the spaceship in New Mexico.
This captive carry flight also let Virgin engineers evaluate VSS Unity for three hours at high altitude and cold temperatures, which the company says are difficult to replicate at ground level. The flight was also an opportunity for Italian Air Force test pilot Nicola ‘Stick’ Pecile to become the fifth pilot to complete a flight in VSS Unity.
As part of the ‘getting ready for space’ process, Virgin Galactic has moved 100 team members to New Mexico, hired 70 local people, and now has transferred the space craft and carrier ship.
With the arrival of SpaceShipTwo in the New Mexico desert, Virgin Galactic says it will launch captive carry and glide flights from the New Mexico base so the spaceflight team can coordinate with Virgin’s airspace and ground control. After the glide tests, the team will carry out rocket-powered test flights from Spaceport America to continue to evaluate the spacecraft’s performance, including “final spaceship cabin and customer experience evaluations in preparation for the start of commercial spaceflight operations.”
WhiteKnightTwo, carrying SpaceShipTwo, takes flight over Spaceport America, northeast of Truth Or ... [+]
The irrepressible Sir Richard Branson, a founder of the company, has vowed to be among the first customers, as a sort of human proof of concept. As the Virgin Galactic website trumpets, “Together we open space to change the world for good.”
Branson will turn 70 in July. But as his improbable career shows, the British billionaire might just pull it off.
