The billionaire space race has reached a new frontier after Sir Richard Branson announced plans to list Virgin Galactic as a public company on the New York stock exchange.
The Virgin tycoon is vying with SpaceX, founded by Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, to be the first business to provide commercial passenger flights in space.
Silicon Valley’s status as a 21st-century Houston was at the fore again on Tuesday, as Branson announced a tie-up with Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire tech investor and former Facebook executive.
It will also further raise hopes that Virgin Galactic is, after numerous delays including a fatal accident on a test flight, genuinely on the brink of operations that have long been proclaimed by Branson to be not far away.
The main contenders in the space tourism race are three rocket companies run by tech billionaires – Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Virgin Galactic plans to start taking people to space on its SpaceShipTwo next year. The 90-minute flights cost $250,000 and passengers will experience a few minutes of weightlessness and be able to see the earth from space. The latest version of SpaceShipTwo, named Unity, carried its first passenger in February – Beth Moses, the company’s chief astronaut instructor, who previously worked at Nasa.
Blue Origin, the company owned by the Amazon chief executive, wants to take people to the moon by 2024. In May 2019 it unveiled its Blue Moon lander, an unmanned spacecraft that can carry up to 6.5 tonnes of cargo. The first flights into space with humans are planned later this year atop its rocket-and-capsule New Shepard, named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space.
Musk, the boss of the electric carmaker Tesla, has set his sights on Mars. SpaceX’s first cargo mission is planned for 2022 and the first crewed mission for 2024.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin invested in a US space tourism company, Space Adventures, in 2008. It does not have its own rockets but has sent tourists into space on Russian Soyuz flights.
Harald McPike, a billionaire adventurer, paid the US firm $7m as a deposit on a $150m space voyage that would take him to the moon. When the moon mission did not materialise, he tried to get his deposit back and reached an out-of-court settlement with the company.
More than 600 people from 60 countries have spent an average £100,000 each – a total of £60m – to secure a spot on one of Branson’s first space flights.
The deposits represent half the total fare price, which is $250,000 (£200,000). The deep-pocketed dreamers hoping to take a 90-minute flight that will only for a brief few moments escape the Earth’s atmosphere include celebrities Justin Bieber and Leonardo DiCaprio. The flights would allow passengers to experience weightlessness and see the planet’s rim from space.
Last October Branson, 68, said he hoped to be onboard an early Virgin Galactic flight “in months not years”, with passengers flying “not too long after that”.
Branson said the deal would “open space to more investors and thousands of new astronauts”. The British firm he founded, majority owned by the Virgin group, will sell a 49% stake and merge with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings, a shell company set up by Palihapitiya and listed in New York.
Palihapitiya, who will chair Virgin Galactic and has pledged a further $100m investment when the deal is completed, said he was confident the firm was “light years ahead of the competition”. Virgin Galactic said the company would be valued at around $1.5bn.
He said the “risk-reward is really compelling”, comparable to software companies right at the start of their growth, adding: “We have 2,500 people on the waiting list who want to be customers. There are many more people who want to go to space than there is room to fly them.”
The fate of his other transport ventures suggest Branson’s eyes are fixed firmly on the heavens: Virgin’s UK train operations, a fixture since rail privatisation, are set to vanish by autumn, and Branson has sold his controlling stake in the Virgin Atlantic airline.
Branson will retain the largest share in Virgin Galactic, whose troubled ascent towards being a viable venture included the loss of a test spaceship, which crashed in the Mojave desert in California in 2014, killing its pilot Michael Alsbury. A potential billion-dollar investment from Saudi Arabia was also suspended after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Turkey.
In December, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo craft reached the edge of space for the first time, and a test flight in February carried a first passenger – Beth Moses, formerly of Nasa and now Virgin’s chief astronaut instructor.
Branson said the flotation could allow Virgin to invest in more craft, stealing a further march on the tech billionaires also in the space race – albeit ones who are aiming to go further into the final frontier. Blue Origin is targeting the moon for passenger trips by 2024.
Meanwhile, Musk has Mars in his sights, with SpaceX planning its first cargo mission to the red planet in 2022, with a crewed mission to follow two years later.
Musk’s rockets already supply the International Space Station, a destination some way beyond the altitude of Branson’s space flights. SpaceX is also planning a passenger flight around the moon in 2023,
A long history of false starts might deter the cautious investor before rushing to buy shares in Virgin Galactic, which could be trading by the end of the year.
However, with a commercial spaceport now at the ready in New Mexico, Branson’s step into space appears to him, as ever, to be just around the corner. He told Sky News: “Next year I’ll be going up.”
