Virgin Galactic becomes first space tourism company to land on Wall Street

NEW YORK -- Virgin Galactic landed on Wall Street Monday, debuting its listing on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in a first for a space tourism company.

Founder Richard Branson appeared on the floor of the NYSE to ring a bell marking the beginning of trading, as fireworks jetted behind him.

"We have pioneered several space milestones, including sending our chief astronaut trainer as the first passenger to space on a commercial spaceship," Virgin Galactic said on Twitter.

"Today, we tick off another first -- now anyone can invest in the future of space."

The company, which will trade under the initials SPCE, ended down 0.34 percent at $11.75, with a valuation of $969 million.

Virgin Galactic joined the NYSE after merging with Social Capital Hedosophia, which was already listed. This allowed it to skip the formal IPO process and bring in $450 million.

Founded in 2004, Virgin Galactic has spent years developing its space program, and after a fatal accident in 2014, has twice crossed the barrier into the final frontier.

The company plans to offer weightless flights to six passengers at a time, at $250,000 (225,750 euros) a ticket for the first customers from the Summer of 2020, though it has yet to begin commercial launches. 

The client-astronauts will be able to float around the ship's cabin and look out of portholes to see the curvature of the Earth, all while surrounded by the blackness of space. 

More than 600 people have already signed up for the journey.

Branson is joined in the new space race by Blue Origin, founded by Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, which wants to offer clients a few minutes of weightlessness aboard a small rocket that takes off vertically.

Tesla's Elon Musk has founded SpaceX, with an eye on long-range space travel.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Earthlings to send 90,000 hellos to Mars

Radio telescopes on Earth will beam 90,000 messages to Mars on Friday to commemorate the launch 50 years ago of the first robotic probe to visit the planet.

A U.S. space funding company called Uwingu organized the extraterrestrial shout-out to mark the 50th anniversary of NASA's Mariner 4 mission and to raise funds for its other projects.

Uwingu's "Beam Me To Mars" initiative invited interested participants to send digital radio-wave transmissions of their names, messages and pictures to Mars for fees ranging from $5 to $99.

The effort attracted several celebrities including actor and comedian Seth Green and actor George Takei, who portrayed Mr. Sulu on the television series "Star Trek."

The transmission is scheduled to begin just after 3 p.m. EST/2000 GMT on Friday. Traveling at the speed of light, the messages will take 15 minutes to reach Mars. The entire transmission will be repeated twice.

While there is no one on Mars to answer the call, project organizers say that is beside the point.

Copies of the messages will be delivered to Congress, to NASA headquarters in Washington, and the United Nations in New York as a show of support for space exploration.

"Though no one is on Mars yet to receive the messages, here on Earth people will hear them loud and clear," Uwingu wrote on the project website.

Uwingu, pronounced "oo-wing-goo" which means "sky" in Swahili, is a privately owned company that raises money to fund space research and educational outreach projects.

Since Mariner 4's successful flyby of Mars, returning the first pictures of the planet's surface, more than 20 other spacecraft have successfully visited, orbited or landed on the planet's surface.

NASA currently has three orbiters and two rovers working on Mars, and the European Space Agency and India each have one Mars orbiter.

The long-term goal of the U.S. space program is to land astronauts on the Red Planet.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com