The next leg of the billionaire space race commences this weekend, with Sir Richard Branson journeying to the edge of space in Virgin Galactic's (NYSE:
SPCE) VSS Unity spaceplane. The flight on Sunday will come just nine days before Jeff Bezos is scheduled to blast into the thermosphere and the rivalry is quickly turning into a cold war. Branson has denied the scheduling was a contest to see who would go up first, while Blue Origin (
BORGN) has said the two companies aren't even after the same prize. "We wish him a great and safe flight, but they're not flying above the Karman line and it's a very different experience," CEO Bob Smith told the
NYT.
Note: The Karman line is the unofficial altitude at which space begins, and starts at 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, above Earth's mean sea level. The measure is named after Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963), a Hungarian American engineer and physicist who was active in aeronautics and astronautics. While the exact marking is subject to debate, he was the first person to determine the altitude at which the atmosphere becomes too thin to support aeronautical flight.
What will the flight look like? The VSS Unity will be carried aboard a so-called mothership aircraft, known as WhiteKnightTwo, which will release the plane at an altitude of 49,000 feet (Blue Origin uses a rocket-launched capsule). At that point, VSS Unity reaches supersonic speed within 8 seconds and climbs vertically until 55 miles above Earth. The plane will then hover at the top of its flight path, giving passengers a few minutes of weightlessness, before re-entering Earth's atmosphere and landing on a runway at Spaceport America, New Mexico. The entire show is expected to take about 90 minutes from takeoff to landing.
Sunday's flight will not only be a make-or-break moment for Virgin Galactic, but for the company's shares as well. If all goes well, expect a rocket ride on Monday morning, though there is plenty that can go wrong. The engine could fail, the cabin could lose pressure or Earth's atmosphere could hamper the space vehicle. Back in 2014, the same spaceplane model suffered a crash that killed a test pilot, when a descent mechanism was triggered at the same time the rocket climbing. There's also the threat that the flight gets called off or weather-related issues postpone the takeoff.
The stock: Options bets on the outcome of the flight could be risky as shares continue their wild ride. SPCE
soared 17% to the $52-level on Thursday after a volatile last few weeks. Wall Street is
mixed on the stock, with four out of 10 analysts rating Galactic at Buy, five Neutral and one Bearish on the company. "In general, every mission that goes up, every rocket that's launched, every bit of progress we make does drive down costs, makes space more affordable [and] accessible to everybody," added Shift4 Payments' Jared Isaacman, who is partnering with SpaceX (
SPACE) to lead the first all-civilian mission into orbit later this year.
Outlook: Galactic's journey will be the fourth test flight for the company and the first with a crew of four on board. It has about 600 customer reservations on its books, most of which were sold at a price of $200K to $250K per ticket several years ago, but another 400 have expressed an interest in booking when sales fully reopen in 2021. While space tourism is expensive for now, it is seen as a means of getting more people interested in the industry for the long term, as well as investing in
satellite infrastructure that could change the way we operate on Earth. (
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