Space tourism firm Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. plans to significantly boost its base of operations in Tustin, at the office park that already holds its executive offices.
The nearly $4 billion-valued aerospace company (NYSE: SPCE), backed by Virgin Group co-founder Richard Branson, recently disclosed it had inked a deal to lease nearly 61,000 square feet of space at the Flight at Tustin Legacy office complex near the intersection of Barranca Parkway at Red Hill Avenue.
The new offices will hold a “new design and collaboration center where the [company’s] next-gen    eration vehicles will be designed and engineered,” according to Virgin Galactic, which already occupies about 12,000 square feet of space at the creative office campus.
The new offices should be large enough to accommodate 200 or so employees.
The company is currently looking to hire dozens of staff for the Orange County location, primarily for engineering and operations-related roles, according to its website.
Its local expansion plans should make Virgin Galactic one of OC’s most active tech firms on the hiring front next year, alongside EV maker Rivian Automotive, defense contractor Anduril Industries and satellite maker Tyvak-Nano Satellite Systems.
$450K Ticket
Virgin Galactic refers to itself as the world’s first commercial spaceline and vertically integrated aerospace company. It is primarily competing with the Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin aerospace firm to send wealthy tourists into space.
It went public two years ago and for a time counted a market value topping $15 billion. It has about a billion dollars of cash on hand and reported a $48 million loss last quarter.
The firm, whose headquarters designation is now in Las Cruces, N.M, successfully completed first fully crewed spaceflight, Unity 22, in July, with multibillionaire Branson a passenger.
It aims to up the number of test flights over the next year and start revenue-generating spaceflights in the early part of 2023.
A seat on an upcoming flight now runs $450,000, following a recent price hike. The company said its goal is to have 1,000 reserved spots by the time commercial service begins. Some 700 of those spots have been sold, and the company said it has collected more than $80 million in future astronaut deposits.
Flights last a couple hours from takeoff to landing, including several minutes of weightlessness, and go about 80 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.
Talent Hub
Virgin Galactic currently handles its flight operations out of Spaceport America—formerly the Southwest Regional Spaceport—in New Mexico.
Spaceport America is on 27 square miles of desert landscape.
The company also has a more than 200,000-square-foot campus in Mojave. That spot houses fabrication, assembly, hangar and office space, and is where the company performs ground and test operations, according to regulatory filings.
The company’s long-term goal is 400 flights per year per spaceport, according to Chief Executive Michael Colglazier. It’s in discussions with other municipalities to build additional space facilities, he said.
To reach that level of flights, “we need to efficiently expand our fleet, and that means growing both our talent base and our footprint,” Colglazier told analysts last month, following the company’s latest earning results.
“To start, we’re investing in a new engineering design and collaboration center,” he said, referring to the new Tustin hub, which he noted was located in a “strong aerospace” sector in Southern California.
“Our design and engineering team has been located at our facility at Mojave. We’ve strong roots at Mojave—it’s a great facility for us, and we will continue to maintain our presence there.
“But we also recognize that growing the business requires us to be in locations where we can access additional talent at scale,” he said of the move.
R&D; Base
The new Tustin office, the Center for Design and Engineering, will be the “primary hub for R&D;, and the design and engineering of our new vehicles—specifically the Delta class spaceships and our next generation of motherships,” Colglazier said.
“We expect to ramp up engineering and support team talent against these programs over the coming three quarters,” he told analysts.
The under-development Delta spaceships are expected to ultimately fly once a week, he said.
Local Disney Ties
Colglazier, who was hired as CEO in mid-2020, knows Orange County well.
He served as president of Anaheim’s Disneyland Resort from 2013 to 2018, where he headed the planning for the $1 billion-valued Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, which opened in 2019.
Colglazier lives in the area and since 2016 has served as chairman of UCI Chief Executive Roundtable. The CEO Roundtable counts some 80 business leaders as members and is designed to support the development and well-being of UCI and area businesses.
$2.5M Annually
The lease for the new offices starts in January, and will run through mid-2028.
Virgin Galactic is paying $2.5 million a year in rent for the offices, according to regulatory filings. That works out to a monthly rent in the $3.40-per-square-foot range.
The specific building at the Flight complex where it is leasing space wasn’t disclosed by the company; records from real estate market tracker CoStar Group Inc. indicate a lease in the 70,000-square-foot range was recently struck at the 1700 Flight Way building at the office park.
That building runs 145,000 square feet and holds the headquarters of fintech Happy Money.
Happy Money put its high-end space on the market for sublease after the onset of the pandemic.
The office campus, built in 2019, is at the former Marine Corps Air Station.Â
