I got a solicitation call from Virgin Galactic after getting an email reminding me I registered and asking to confirm my phone number and a good time to call. They say they are about half way through their group of “Founders”. The first 100 seats paying full price of $200,000. They are keeping two other queues. “Pioneers” are people who pay $100,000 and get to be one of the first 1,000 people in space on the whole planet. They project that will be 300-400 people depending on how many people their competitors and NASA put up into space in the mean time. Then they will start taking people who put down $20,000. All of these deposits are “refundable”.

In any case, that is about $10 million in the bank from the Founders. They did say that they are using the money to develop the product. I will seek further clarification from Virgin Galactic on whether that is just the interest and the money is in escrow or what. If not, it would really be a player mutual sort of like the one I proposed about a year ago in The Space Review. I will aim to post terms and conditions when I receive them.

You get a seat number in your queue if you put up the money. Could someone with $320,000 please put that up so I can get an exact count on the number of seats with deposits in each queue? They project 500 riders in their first year. That’s $100 million dollars. Pretty good revenue on a $100 million investment. That also means that the non-Founders and Pioneers will start flying no later than year 2.

If you don’t have the money, you will be pleased to hear that their skill game partner is Virgin Games. More about that next week depending on what I am told and what kind of non-disclosure terms I have to agree to.