Virgin Galactic Holdings (NYSE: SPCE) founder has recently sold over $150 million worth of SPCE stock, with share price ranging between $26.85 and $28.73. However (SPCE) shares were falling -4.95% to trade at $25.36 in pre-market at the last check.
Virgin Galactic had aimed to initiate space tourism by the end of last year, but pandemic-related delays as well as hindrance due to mechanical testing issues has further pushed back that timeline. SPCE saw a 3.49% plummet adjacent to the news about SPCE problems with hundreds of clients already signed up for a trip around space, costing $250,000.
Now what
5.584 million shares of Virgin Galactic were sold by Branson and several entities related to Virgin holding, for total proceeds of $150.3M. Virgin Galactic went public in 2019 through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in affiliation with Chamath Palihapitiya. Chairman of Virgin Galactic, Chamath Palihapitiya sold approximately 6.2 million sharesat a price of $34.32 per stock, obtaining $213 million, last month. Virgin Galactic was also left by chief space officer George Whitesides, who was once chief of staff at NASA, who left to pursue potential opportunities in public service.
Recently, Virgin Galactic also released “VSS Imagine,” its second spacecraft, and the first of its next-generation class of vehicles in its fleet.
“For us to make the business start to scale, at the places that we’re aspiring towards, we need two things: We need many more ships than we have right now and we also need the ships that we bring forward to be built in a way that they’re able to be maintained in a way that we can have much quicker [turnaround times between flights] than what we have with Unity,” stated Colglazier, Virgins chief executive.
SPCE is striving for commercialization and development of the spacecraft that it plans to use to fly people to the edge of space however several setbacks like electromagnetic interference caused problems for the spacecraft, with the next attempt expected to be in May.
Conclusion
SPCE operates in the lucrative field of space tourism with hundreds of clients ready to take a trip around the edge of space for approximately 250,000. However, a combination of pandemic related delays as well as mechanical issues present in SPCE aircrafts has reduced investor interest with the stock plummeting 4.95% at the last check.
