3, 2, 1…blastoff. Virgin Galactic preps for launch.
Richard Branson’s spaceflight company is set to become the first may soon first publicly company of its kind. Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings plans to invest about $800 million in the venture for a 49% stake, and Virgin Galactic would go public as part of the deal, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing anonymous sources.
So far, approximately 600 people have forked over somewhere near $80M for space tourism with Virgin Galactic. But Branson’s new venture definitely has its competition cut out. Jeff Bezos has launched his own Blue Origin while Elon Musk’s SpaceX is also formulating plans to send tourists into space.
But Virgin Galactic has certainly broken ground. On Virgin’s homepage, Branson wrote: “Sometimes the most far-fetched schemes are the most plausible. Often sensible plans go out of the window. Who would have thought the company who brought you the Sex Pistols would go on to run a bank? Or the guy who borrowed a second-hand plane would one day fly the public to space? You’ve got to have a dream before you can go about making it come true.”
Space is no longer the final frontier, it’s the next one, and it’s right around the corner.
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Mary Drumond is Chief Marketing Officer at survey tech startup Worthix, and host of the Voices of Customer Experience Podcast. Originally a passion project, the podcast runs weekly and features some of the most influential CX thought-leaders, practitioners and academia on challenges, development and the evolution of CX.
