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Virgin Galactic is gearing up to become the first publicly traded spaceflight company, and the company is gearing up to become profitable by August 2021, which would put it a little over a year ahead of schedule. profitability forecasts from another transportation company that simply moves people to Earth. : Uber.
The Wall Street Journal announced that Virgin Galactic was merging with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings (SCH), which would own 49% of the capital and invest approximately $ 800 million in space tourism.
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"We are at the dawn of a new space age, with tremendous potential to enhance and sustain life on Earth," said Richard Branson, founder and president of Virgin Galactic, in a statement. "By embarking on this new chapter, at this late stage of Virgin Galactic's development, we can open spaces for more investors and, in the process, thousands of new astronauts."
These advances have had costs, namely the wreckage of a Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo craft test flight in October 2014 that killed the two pilots inside. Since then, no one has died on Virgin devices, but of course, traveling in the private space remains a dangerous gamble.
In December 2019, the Virgin VSS Unity was the first of the company's boats to go to the edge of space. Earlier this year, Virgin Galactic sent for the first time in space two pilots and a test passenger.
"Since we have put two spacecraft in space … and created five new astronauts, the first astronauts built on American soil since 2009, we have asked 2,500 people to register", Branson told CNBC. "The market is huge."
Chamath Palihapitiya, director of SCH, told CNBC that the company currently has more than 600 customers willing to pay $ 250,000 for a one and a half hour flight. Palihapitiya said potential customers had already deposited more than $ 80 million in deposits. The company plans to launch its first customer flights one year from now.
It seems like a lot of rich people want to go into space. And while Branson's Virgin Galactic rivals Eon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin in the race for the private sector race, Virgin Galactic seems to be the closest way to give the rich the opportunity to take a short trip beyond the earth's atmosphere.
It may seem absurd that so many rich people are willing to spend a quarter of a million for a 90-minute trip that leaves them only a few moments at the dawn of the cosmos. But when we have been promised to travel in the civilian space for decades, I imagine the elite will take what they can get. And giving thousands of wealthy people the opportunity to say they have gone into space could be a viable way to achieve profitability in the next two years. (For what it's worth, Branson told CNBC: "In ten years we should see a pretty dramatic drop in our prices.")
This certainly seems to be a better way to make money than to turn the ride on the road into a carpool. Last month, in its first earnings report as a public company, Uber posted a loss of $ 1 billion from its last quarter. The company has lost about as much in previous quarters and is losing money on every Uber ride. The only hope of the company in terms of profitability lies in the addition of fleets of autonomous vehicles.
This will not happen until 2021, when Virgin Galactic expects (hopefully) to be profitable. We will check in two years to see if expensive space travel or costly robot cars are winning.
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