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Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. is a visionary space tourism company founded by Richard Branson. Its headquarters is in California and it operates from New Mexico, at Spaceport America., for take-off and landing.
They are developing commercial space tourism spacecraft to provide suborbital spaceflights. The simplistic mission profile is that Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spacecraft are air launched (dropped, and then their rocket fires up) from beneath the carrier airplane “White Knight Two”. From there, the sub-orbital power up to low earth orbit and space tourists can enjoy a few minutes of zero-gravity.
It is hard to encapsulate the entirety of the Virgin Galactic business-ride in a few short sentences but let’s just say it in a few words: A bumpy ride for investors in space tourism! The vision is grand but the execution is tricky, to say the least. Hopefully a fleet of Virgin Galactic suborbital spacecraft will fly from more space ports around the world.
Virgin Galactic’s maiden spaceflight in 2018 was VSS Unity spaceship, initial plans were to start in 2010, but was delayed multiple time, mainly due to the 2014 crash of VSS Enterprise.
Fortunately, they are continuing sub-orbital flights and will open the door for more aspiring space tourism ventures.
The Virgin Galactic stock is literally a rocket-ride. Every technical mishap leads to a share price correction, and they generally track the NASDAQ. The business model is you pay a cool US$200k for space experience that lasts as long as an after sex cigarette. This will improve, the cost will come down, but will the duration be longer?