Virgin Group
British multinational conglomerate
Follow Virgin Group on Notably News to receive short updates to your email — rarely!
| March 14 2025 | Virgin Limited Edition maintains ownership of eight luxury properties across multiple countries, including locations in the British Virgin Islands, Morocco, Kenya, South Africa, Switzerland, and Spain. |
| February 2025 | Estimated ticket price for a seat reached approximately $600,000. |
| 2025 | Virgin Galactic plans to begin testing its third generation Delta-class spaceship, designed for higher production volumes and functionally similar to the SpaceShip III class. |
| December 11 2024 | Qatar Airways announced direct routes to Doha from Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth on behalf of Virgin Australia, with ticket bookings opening for travels starting June 2025. |
| June 2024 | Virgin Galactic halted commercial flights of the VSS Unity spaceplane to concentrate on developing the next-generation Delta-class spacecraft, marking a strategic pivot in their space tourism operations. |
| March 2024 | Virgin Orbit and Matthew Brown Companies resolved their civil litigation, with Brown being awarded $10 million from the company's Directors and Officers insurance policy. |
| 2023 | Virgin Orbit went bankrupt after conducting a few space launches. |
| June 15 2023 | Additional assets worth $3.8 million were sold to Firefly Aerospace, with Virgin Orbit's intellectual property also being put up for sale. |
| May 2023 | Assets were divested to multiple bidders: Rocket Lab acquired the Long Beach facility for $16 million, Launcher purchased the Mojave test site for $3 million, and Stratolaunch Systems bought the Cosmic Girl aircraft for $17 million. |
| May 22 2023 | Virgin Orbit finalized its Chapter 11 bankruptcy auction, with remaining assets divested for $36 million, which was less than 1% of the company's initial IPO valuation. |
| April 4 2023 | Virgin Orbit declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. |
| March 16 2023 | Virgin Orbit announced a pause in operations and furloughed nearly its entire staff while seeking additional funding, after recording a loss of US$139.5 million in the first nine months of 2022. |
| January 9 2023 | LauncherOne failed to reach orbit during Virgin Orbit's first launch from Spaceport Cornwall. The mission encountered an 'anomaly' with the upper stage, resulting in the failure to deploy nine satellites from seven different customers. |
| 2022 | Virgin Orbit considered a potential mission to Mars, but ultimately did not proceed with the interplanetary mission. |
| September 2022 | Virgin Orbit signed an agreement with Wagner Corporation to establish a launch site at Toowoomba Wellcamp Airport in Queensland, Australia, with plans for a demonstrator launch in 2024. |
| July 2 2022 | VOX Space successfully completed its first launch of cubesats for US Space Force using the Virgin Orbit LauncherOne launch vehicle. |
| July 2 2022 | LauncherOne flew a successful mission. |
| June 27 2022 | Virgin Orbit announced the establishment of a Brazil-based subsidiary, Virgin Orbit Brasil Ltda, to facilitate potential launches from the Alcantara Launch Center, which is strategically located just two degrees south of the Equator. |
| January 13 2022 | LauncherOne successfully delivered seven cubesats for three customers into orbit. |
| January 7 2022 | Virgin Orbit held an 'opening bell' ceremony at Nasdaq to celebrate going public, with the stock opening at $10 per share. |
| 2021 | The company announces its intention to join the London stock market with a listing on the AIM market. |
| December 2021 | Virgin Orbit went public, raising $228 million through its SPAC merger, which was less than the $483 million initially expected. |
| December 30 2021 | Virgin Orbit completed a SPAC merger with NextGen Acquisition Corp, becoming a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ stock exchange with a valuation of $3.7 billion. |
| August 2021 | Virgin Orbit announced a SPAC merger and estimated needing $420 million in cash to reach positive cash flow by 2024, with Mubadala having invested about $1 billion in the company through August. |
| August 17 2021 | Mark Baird became the president of VOX Space. |
| July 11 2021 | Fully crewed test flight with two pilots (Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci) and four passengers (Richard Branson, Beth Moses, Colin Bennett, and Sirisha Bandla). The flight briefly deviated from its reserved airspace, leading to an FAA grounding. |
| June 30 2021 | LauncherOne successfully delivered its first commercial payload to space. |
| April 2021 | Brazilian Space Agency selected Virgin Orbit as one of the companies approved to operate orbital launches from the Alcantara Launch Center in Brazil. |
| January 17 2021 | LauncherOne successfully reached orbit for the first time, deploying 10 CubeSats into Low Earth Orbit for NASA on its final demonstration mission. The rocket was launched from a Boeing 747 at 33,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean and was dedicated to the memory of Eve Branson, Richard Branson's mother, who died from COVID-19 on January 8, 2021. |
| 2020 | VOX Space was created as a subsidiary of Virgin Orbit to provide launch services for the US military's national security launch market. |
| 2020 | LauncherOne began flight operations, launching the first of six total flights between 2020 and 2023. |
| May 25 2020 | LauncherOne's first launch failed to reach orbit. |
| April 2020 | VOX Space was awarded a contract for three launches of 44 cubesats for US Space Force. |
| April 2020 | Virgin Orbit was granted emergency use authorization by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for their simplified mechanical ventilators, developed in partnership with the University of California Irvine and the University of Texas at Austin to address the global ventilator shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic. |
| October 2019 | Matthew Stannard, a former Royal Air Force test and evaluation pilot, joined Virgin Orbit as a pilot on a three-year contract, coinciding with the company's preparation to start testing its Cosmic Girl launch platform. |
| February 2019 | First flight carrying a third crew member in the passenger cabin. |
| 2017 | Virgin Orbit was founded in Long Beach, California, with over 300 employees led by president Dan Hart, a former Boeing vice president of government satellite systems. |
| 2017 | LauncherOne business was spun off into Virgin Orbit as a separate entity. |
| July 3 2015 | Virgin Wines reports a 13% increase in turnover for its main online business in the first full financial year after the management buy-out, with annual sales reaching nearly £40 million and trading profit at £4.3 million. |
| November 2013 | CEO Jay Wright and the management team, supported by Mobeus Equity Partners and Connection Capital, completed a £15.9 million management buy-out of Virgin Wines. |
| July 2013 | Virgin Wines wins Innovator of the Year at the International Wine Challenge Merchant of the Year Awards. |
| 2010 | Virgin Unite recognized Joe Polish as their first 'Entrepreneur of the Quarter'. |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia articles Virgin Australia, Virgin Unite, Virgin Wines, Virgin Limited Edition, Virgin Orbit & Virgin Galactic, which are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.