Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson’s space tourism venture, is preparing to go public.
It has struck a deal with a special-purpose acquisition firm, Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings, which will invest $800m (£640m) in Virgin Galactic in return for a 49% stake, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal could be announced as early as Tuesday.
Social Capital Hedosophia, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, was set up by Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive. Saudi Arabia had planned to plough $1bn into Virgin Galactic in 2017, but Branson suspended the talks a year later after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident journalist, at the Saudi consulate in Turkey.
Virgin Galactic believes that the investment will provide enough capital to fund the business until its spaceships can operate commercially and generate a profit. It has already raised more than $1bn, mostly from Branson, since it was created in 2004. About 600 people have paid $80m in deposits to secure seats on the first flights.
Branson’s firm is racing to become the first commercial venture take passengers into space next year. It is initially selling 700 tickets for flights lasting about six minutes.
In December, Virgin Galactic launched a rocket plane into space for the first time. In February, a test flight carried a passenger for the first time, in addition to the two pilots, Beth Moses, the chief astronaut instructor at Virgin Galactic, who previously worked for Nasa. Branson is expected to board his ship himself soon.
Moses told Aviation Week she was weightless for several minutes during the flight and left her seat to float twice but felt “squished” into it when the ship re-entered the earth’s atmosphere.
Branson’s firm is competing with other tech billionaires in the race to take people to the moon – Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX.
Blue Origin, the company owned by the Amazon chief executive, wants to transport people to the moon by 2024, it announced in May, when it unveiled its Blue Moon lander, an unmanned spacecraft that can carry up to 6.5 tonnes of cargo.
Musk, the chief executive of the electric carmaker Tesla, is working to bring passengers to Mars with SpaceX. The first cargo mission is planned for 2022 and the first crewed mission for 2024.
