Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, is a British-American spaceflight company focused on providing suborbital spaceflights to space tourists and researchers. As the world's first commercial spaceline, it develops and operates its own reusable spaceflight systems, including the SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo. While the company is shifting its focus to Delta class vehicles for commercial service in 2026, its current partners include Redwire for manufacturing research payload lockers and it operates from Spaceport America in New Mexico.
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Virgin Galactic completed its SPAC transaction in 2019, triggering a surge of SPAC activity in the space sector.
Virgin Galactic merged with Social Capital Hedosophia in 2019 and sparked the current wave of space SPAC transactions.
Virgin Galactic’s market capitalization was $8,700,000,000 as of early March in the referenced period.
Virgin Galactic retired The Spaceship Company brand as part of an internal realignment in December.
Enrico Palermo left Virgin Galactic in late 2020 to become head of the Australian Space Agency after serving as chief operating officer of Virgin Galactic and president of The Spaceship Company.
Jon Campagna left Virgin Galactic effective 2021-03-01 and was succeeded as chief financial officer by Doug Ahrens.
Enrico Palermo had worked at Virgin Galactic since 2006.
Swami Iyer will lead the team of engineers, designers, technicians, and support teams who are building Virgin Galactic’s fleet of vehicles and designing future opportunities underpinning Virgin Galactic’s business.
Stephen Justice begins his role as Virgin Galactic’s Vice President of Engineering on 2021-03-01.
George Whitesides joined Virgin Galactic in 2010 as chief executive after serving as chief of staff at NASA Headquarters.
Enrico Palermo is the new head of the Australian Space Agency and was formerly the COO of Virgin Galactic.
Virgin Galactic merged with the SPAC Social Capital Hedosophia in 2019, a deal that raised $460,000,000 and took Virgin Galactic public on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2019.
At the conclusion of the fall 2021 stand-down, Virgin Galactic expects VSS Unity to begin flying private astronauts and SpaceShip III to be in a position to complete its flight testing in early 2022.
Virgin Galactic expects the next powered test flight of VSS Unity to take place in May 2021.
Virgin Galactic implemented shielding of components to reduce electromagnetic interference and prepared for a powered test flight originally scheduled for 2021-02-13.
Virgin Galactic's delay of SpaceShipTwo test flights will postpone flights of space tourists to 2022.
The Italian Air Force flight under the 2019-10-01 agreement is expected to occur in late summer or 2021-09-05 and to generate revenue for Virgin Galactic and conclude the company's product test program.
Virgin Galactic had a cash balance of $666,000,000 at the end of 2020 while losing about $60,000,000 per quarter.
Virgin Galactic has an agreement signed in October 2019 to fly a mission for the Italian Air Force that will carry research payloads and three Italian payload specialists.
Virgin Galactic conducted a secondary stock offering in 2020 that raised $441,000,000.