Former Virgin Galactic (NYS: SPCE) CEO George Whitesides is seeking to represent California’s 27th district in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Welcome to S-SPACⁱ.

Rocket Lab (NAS: RKLB) has added the Frontier-X software-defined radio and the 12Nms reaction wheel to its catalog of satellite products.

With Virgin Galactic promising that suborbital tourism flights from Spaceport America in New Mexico are right around the corner, the authority that oversees the facility has decided it needs a brand new building there.

Japan’s new rocket fizzled on the pad last week as the United States and Russia prepared for key launches this week to the International Space Station (ISS).

Virgin Galactic’s stock soared 13.5% on Wednesday as the company’s WhiteKnightTwo mothership took to the skies for the first time in more than 15 months. The stock rose by $0.71 from its close on Tuesday to close today at $6.01 as news of the flight test from the Mojave Air and Space Port at Rutan Field in California spread on social media.

Welcome this week’s S-SPACⁱ.

Intuitive Machines (NAS: LUNR) debuted on the NASDAQ exchange on Tuesday after the company received only a fraction of the amount it had planned to raise by merging with the Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

Welcome to our newest feature, SpaceTech Briefs. Today we’ll look at some of the things NASA is doing these days.

NASA Looks to Open Suborbital Flights to Researchers

While NASA has been happy to provide funding for microgravity experiments and technology demonstrations on suborbital flights by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, it has drawn the line at funding its own personnel to fly along with their payloads. That could soon change, however.

Welcome to this week’s S-SPACⁱ.

Lunar lander builder Intuitive Machines looks to join the Space SPAC index this week. Shareholders are set to vote on its reverse merger with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. on Wednesday morning. If the deal goes through, the Houston-based company will begin trading on Nasdaq under the symbol LUNR.

After a 15-month overhaul, Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo VMS Eve carrier aircraft is once again basking in the bright sunshine of the Mojave Desert as it prepares for taxi tests today. Follow www.twitter.com/spacecom for updates.

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

Resplendent in a blue Virgin Galactic flight suit, Richard Branson was in an exuberant mood as he sat at the New York Stock Exchange doing a TV interview on Oct. 28, 2019. His space tourism company had just gone public in a $774 million merger with billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital Hedosophia special purpose acquisition company.

Virgin Galactic now had an estimated market value of more than $2.2 billion despite never having flown a single passenger or earned any serious revenue in 15 years. Virgin Galactic would have $450 million to complete its flight test program and begin commercial flights — if the company’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings were to be believed — in June 2020. Branson and the Mubadala Investment Company, an Abu Dhabi government sovereign wealth fund, would divide up $274 million to offset about $1 billion in investment made thus far.