As Virgin Galactic is involved in GameStop mania, it flies back

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At a time when nontraditional investors are buying heavily sold stocks like GameStop and AMC Networks, the search for other targets is among the best selling stocks on the market.

Among those shares is Virgin Galactic, which has a “percentage of shares sold” of around 70%. This means that institutional traders shorted about 70% of the shares available for public trading. This is a big bet for investors that the company will go bankrupt.

About a year after joining the New York Stock Exchange as an SPCE, Virgin Galactic normally traded between $ 15 and $ 25 per share. Last week, it skyrocketed to $ 58.65 and has remained comfortably above $ 40 since then in trades attributed to the short stock buying craze.

Virgin Galactic – which is developing a series of space planes to take tourists on short suborbital flights over 80 km – stands out among the list of best-selling stocks. Most of these companies, like GameStop, Bed Bath & Beyond and The Children’s Place, are traditional companies attacked by online shopping, the pandemic and other forces that affect profits.

In contrast, Virgin Galactic is relatively new to the stock market and is developing a futuristic service. The company remains far from profitable and still struggles to get its first space vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, in commercial service. Your best years, in terms of profitability, are years in the future, if ever. It will require flight missions to the edge of space frequently, perhaps on a weekly basis.

The recent increase in Virgin Galactic’s stock comes at a time when the company is finally resuming its motorized flight program. In mid-December, almost two full years after its last powerful space flight, Virgin Galactic tried to send its SpaceShipTwo space plane on its third suborbital flight over 80km.

However, shortly after the space plane was released from its aircraft carrier, called White Knight Two, the ignition sequence to start the space plane’s engine has not been completed. As a result, the rocket engine failed and the two pilots on board safely slid the vehicle back onto a runway in New Mexico, instead of flying above the atmosphere. Subsequently, the company began to investigate this flaw in the on-board computer, which interrupted the ignition of the rocket engine, and began to take steps to correct it.

Prior to the December test flight, Virgin Galactic had established a very strict schedule, which would have included another suborbital flight with four mission specialists flying within the SpaceShipTwo to ensure your readiness for business operations. This would be followed by a final test flight, taking Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson during the first quarter of 2021. After that point, the company intended to start flying commercial missions with paying customers.

On Monday, Virgin Galactic said its next test flight is scheduled for a flight window that will open on February 13. This test flight will test the corrective work done since the December 12 flight, as well as evaluate the new internal cabin, which has been updated for passengers. The results of this test flight “will inform the next steps in the test flight program,” said the company. Trade missions, therefore, are unlikely before at least the second half of this year.

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