To the NYSE and beyond: Virgin Galactic becomes first public space tourism company
Source: Washington Post
Virgin Galactic stock popped in its New York Stock Exchange debut Monday, with shares rising more than 12 percent as investors welcomed the first publicly traded space tourism company. The Richard Branson company merged last week with Social Capital Hedosophia, a New York investment firm already listed on the NYSE, allowing Virgin Galactic to bypass the standard stock offering process. Social Capital Hedosophia took a 46.5 percent stake, giving Virgin Galactic a valuation of more than $1.5 billion. Initially priced at $12 a share, Virgin Galactic stock was trading around $13.50 a share by midmorning.
“Virgin Galactic is making history again today as it becomes the world’s first and only publicly traded commercial human spaceflight company,” chief executive George Whitesides said in a statement. “For the first time, anyone will have the opportunity to invest in a human spaceflight company that is transforming the market.”
The public debut of Virgin Galactic — which takes the SPCE ticker — is a major milestone for the fast-growing space sector, which is projected to be worth $2.7 trillion by 2045, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. For years, Virgin Galactic has been locked in competition with fellow billionaire-led enterprises, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. Bezos has said Blue Origin is vying to build a lunar lander for NASA, as it aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. (Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)
Virgin Galactic was founded in 2004, but it suffered serious setbacks after a spaceship came apart during a test flight over the Mojave Desert in 2014, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury. The company has raised more than $1 billion since its inception, but much of it came directly from Branson, a British billionaire. Boeing recently invested $20 million for a 1 percent stake in the company, which said its first commercial flights will commence in mid-2020.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/28/virgin-galactic-takes-space-tourism-public-with-historic-nyse-listing/
= new reply since forum marked as read
on the Concorde back in the day. 
