By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Virgin Galactic (NYSE:SPCE) was up 10% in Monday’s premarket trading after the company successfully completed its first full-crew spaceflight at the weekend, crewed by its founder Richard Branson among others.
Although the V.S.S. Unity had made space trips earlier as well, this was its full-crew flight ahead of a planned commercial launch next year. Two more test flights have to happen before that. This was the fourth in total.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the company has collected $80 million in deposits from sale of tickets for a space ride. Each ticket is going for anywhere between $200,000 and $250,000, according to various reports.
Those on the company’s wait list include Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, who otherwise has his own space flight ambitions, being pursued through his company SpaceX.
The flight marks a milestone for the space tourism industry that is still in its infancy. Branson beat Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos in the race of billionaires to go into space. Bezos has flight aboard Blue Origin scheduled for July 20.