Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc

Formation and early activities

Virgin Galactic was founded in 2004 by British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, who had previously founded the Virgin Group and the Virgin Atlantic airline, and who had a long personal history of balloon and surface record-breaking activities.

The Spaceship Company

The Spaceship Company (TSC) was founded by Richard Branson through Virgin Group (which owned 70%) and Burt Rutan through Scaled Composites (which owned 30%) to build commercial spaceships and launch aircraft for space travel. From the time of TSC's formation in 2005, the launch customer was Virgin Galactic, which contracted to purchase five SpaceShipTwos and two WhiteKnightTwos. Scaled Composites was contracted to develop and build the initial prototypes of WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo, and then TSC began production of the follow-on vehicles beginning in 2008. In 2012, after Northrop Grumman acquired Scaled Composites, Virgin Galactic acquired the remaining 30% of The Spaceship Company.

Investors

After a claimed investment by Virgin Group of US$100 million, in 2010 the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, Aabar Investments group, acquired a 31.8% stake in Virgin Galactic for US$280 million, receiving exclusive regional rights to launch tourism and scientific research space flights from the United Arab Emirates capital. In July 2011, Aabar invested a further US$110 million to develop a program to launch small satellites into low Earth orbit, raising their equity share to 37.8%. The New Mexico government has invested approximately $200m (£121m) in the Spaceport America facility, for which Virgin Galactic is the anchor tenant; other commercial space companies also use the site.

On Monday, October 28, 2019, Virgin Galactic listed on the New York Stock Exchange, trading under the ticker symbol 'SPCE', the first publicly traded space tourism company. The company raised $450 million through a SPAC merger listing, and the company's market value after listing was more than $2.4 billion. At the time, the company claimed to have over 600 customer reservations representing approximately $80 million in total collected deposits and more than $120 million in "potential revenue".