Virgin Galactic by Richard Branson prepares to go public | Science

Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson's space tourism company, is preparing to go public.

It has reached an agreement with a specialized acquisition company, Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings, which will invest $ 800 million in Virgin Galactic in exchange for a 49% stake, according to the Wall Street Journal. The agreement could be announced as early as Tuesday.

Hedosophia, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, was created by Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive. Saudi Arabia had planned to release $ 1 billion in Virgin Galactic in 2017, but Branson suspended negotiations a year later after the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey. .

Virgin Galactic believes that the investment will provide enough capital to finance the company until its spaceships can function commercially and generate a profit. Since its inception in 2004, it has already raised more than $ 1 billion, mostly from Branson. About 600 people paid $ 80 million in deposits to secure seats on the first flights.

Branson is striving to become the first commercial airline to carry pbadengers in space next year. It initially sells 700 tickets for flights of about six minutes duration.

In December, Virgin Galactic launched a rocket plane into space for the first time. In February, a test flight carried for the first time a pbadenger, in addition to the two pilots, Beth Moses, chief astronaut instructor at Virgin Galactic, who previously worked for NASA. Branson will soon be getting on his ship himself.

Moses told Aviation Week that she was weightless for several minutes during the flight and that she had left her seat to float twice but had felt "crushed" in when the ship had reentered Earth's atmosphere.

The Branson Group competes with other billionaires in the technology sector, Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX, the rocket company of Elon Musk.

Blue Origin, the company owned by the chief executive of the Amazon, wants to transport people to the moon by 2024, announced in May the unveiling of its lander Blue Moon, an unmanned spacecraft carrying up to 6 , 5 tons of freight.

Musk, general manager of electric car manufacturer Tesla, is working to bring pbadengers to Mars with SpaceX. The first cargo mission is scheduled for 2022 and the first crewed mission for 2024.