The race for space has come back on the scene in recent years, with a completely different goal than landing the Moon: to market space flights. And this battle, Virgin Galactic could well win.
A major investment for manned spaceflight
According to the Wall Street Journal, the company created by Richard Branson will soon be listed. Social Capital Hedosophia Holding plans to invest $ 800 million in Virgin Galactic for a stake of 49%. Through this acquisition, Virgin Galactic would become the first publicly-traded company to offer human spaceflight. On the other hand, this investment is supposed to guarantee Virgin Galactic enough capital to finance its development costs until its spaceships are operational, and can generate profits.
A new race to space
If Virgin Galactic seems to be getting ahead of its competitors Blue Origin(the company of Jeff Bezos, boss of Amazon) and SpaceX (owned by Elon Musk), the race is not quite over yet, and these two actors continue to work on ways that will pave the way for space tourism. SpaceX is best known for the development of reusable rockets, drastically reducing the costs of launching equipment in space, and for projects concerning the colonization of the planet Mars, although space tourism has been a lever since the beginning. which will once again allow the lower costs. The democratization of space tourism also makes plans for Blue Origin, which has, in turn, signed several contracts with governments for the launch of equipment, as well as a lunar landing module.
Virgin Galactic has truly focused on suborbital flights, both for developing space tourism and for conducting experiments, even though it's Virgin Orbit subsidiary still offers the launch of small satellites. Originally, Richard Branson's company could have been financed by Saudi Arabia to the tune of one billion euros, but the entrepreneur finally dismissed this offer. Social Capital Hedosophia, a company created by Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive, then came on the scene. If spaces for a suborbital flight have already been proposed for $ 250,000 per person, this $ 800 million could really make things happen in the near future, and this, for all players in this new race to the world space.
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