Richard Branson goes public with some extravagant promises to keep
After 15 years of making extravagant but unkept promises to fly more than 600 “future astronauts” to space, Richard Branson must now please an entirely new group of people who are usually much shorter on patience: shareholders.
Following the completion last week of a merger with Social Capital Hedosophia (SCH), the British billionaire’s Virgin Galactic suborbital “space line” will begin trading under its own name on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Monday.
Going public now is an unusual move for a space tourism company that hasn’t flown a singlet tourist to space since Branson announced the SpaceShipTwo program in 2004. Some might see it has putting the cart before the horse.
SpaceShipTwo has flown only two suborbital flights to date. Powered flights total a mere nine, with one failure. Commercial missions originally promised for 2008 will now take place sometime next year. Suborbital space tourism doesn’t even exist as an industry..
Adding to the investors’ concerns: flying aboard rocket-powered vehicles is inherently dangerous. Boosters have a tendency to explode, wander off course and otherwise fail spectacularly. The SpaceShipTwo program has already claimed three lives in a test stand explosion, and one more in an in-flight breakup.