Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc (SPCE)

[mick]

Bloomberg/Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. became

the first space-tourism business to go public as it began trading

Monday on the New York Stock Exchange with a market value of about $1 billion.

The listing, carried out through a merger with shell investment
company that was already trading,

secures vital new funding for Branson as the British entrepreneur

competes with fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in what’s

been dubbed “the new space race.”

Investors are being asked to back a project that’s already been
running for 15 years without yet achieving a first commercial launch,

and which came close to folding following a fatal crash during a 2014 test flight.

Virgin Galactic combined last week with the investment firm,

Social Capital Hedosophia, rather than conduct an initial public offering.

That avoided a costly investor roadshow and the challenge of selling shares in such a company likely to be perceived as high risk by many.

The new entity climbed
5.3% to $12.41 at 9:32 a.m. in New York on Monday,
its first day trading under the ticker SPCE.

The shares rose 11% Friday after the combination was completed,
handing Virgin Galactic more than $450 million in primary proceeds.

Virgin Galactic is one of a trio of billionaire-backed space startups, each tapping different technologies.

Branson is using an aircraft to carry a spaceship to high altitudes, where it blasts away,

while AMZN, Amazon.com Inc. founder Bezos’s Blue Origin relies on more-conventional rockets and

TSLA. Tesla Inc. chief Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. deploys reusable launchers.

While transporting satellites has been a focus for SpaceX,

Branson is chasing the tourism market, planning a first commercial flight next year.

Blue Origin plans to take payloads and tourists to the edge of space
on an 11-minute flight,

while Musk has joined the race with a pledge to send passengers to
the
moon,
Mars and
beyond.

Branson said last week that Virgin Galactic also is interested
in developing hypersonic airline flights after Boeing Co.’s
future-technologies arm pledged $20 million for a minority stake.

That could mean linking U.S. cities in a matter of minutes and, ultimately, the U.S. and U.K. with Australia in just a few hours.

Social Capital Hedosophia founder,
Sri Lanka-born Chamath Palihapitiya, will contribute $100 million
to the venture and become its chairman.

Virgin Galactic has raised more than $1 billion since it was founded
in 2004, initially from Branson,

with an Abu Dhabi investment company taking a stake in 2010.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Christopher Jasper in London
at [e-mail]

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Palazzo at [e-mail], Tony Robinson

For more articles like this, please visit us at http://www.bloomberg.com

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.