Virgin Orbit to be sold, whole or in parts
In a hearing in DC bankruptcy courts Monday, a judge approved plans for Virgin Orbit to be sold swiftly this month. The plan would allow potential buyers to submit bids for the company’s assets or the company as a whole. The first deadline is tomorrow, May 4, for non-biding indications of interest, with the formal bid required by May 15.
An auction will occur on May 18, with a hearing to formalize the purchase(s) on May 24. So if this all goes to plan, we will know if Virgin Orbit will live on in some fashion by the end of the month or be chopped up.
The best outcome here would be the sale of the company as a whole. This way, Virgin Orbit and its 100 or so employees still on staff would be able to continue its work towards the launch of its next LauncherOne rocket sometime this year. The company recently announced it had finished its investigation into what caused the failure of its previous mission and that its next rocket is close to being complete.
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A partial sale of the company might not be the end of the world, but it would definitely mean a change to how Virgin Orbit operates. For example, maybe a bidder purchases the company’s rocket technology to develop a hypersonic research test bed for the Department of Defense. Or an airline buys its 747 as Boeing has retired the aircraft from production. Virgin Investment Limited would have a priority on that, however, if the company began to sell off assets.
However, there is also a chance all of Virgin Orbits’ assets are split up and sold off with nothing remaining to form a single company. In that case, it would be the end of Virgin Orbit, at least how we see it now.
How we got here
In case this is your first read of Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy, let’s get you caught up. In January, Virgin Orbit suffered an inflight failure of its LauncherOne rocket on its first mission from Spaceport Cornwall in the UK. While this didn’t cause the company’s cash burn crisis, it didn’t help.
In March, the company announced a furlough of its employees and paused operations as it looked for an investment lifeline. Virgin Investment Limited, Richard Branson’s investment arm of Virgin Group, stopped providing the needed loans to continue operations and only gave enough to keep the company going until it found a new source of cash.
In late March, there was hope that a buyer would come with several options being hinted at and some employees returning to work. However, as the offers fell through, the company officially laid off all but 100 employees and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in early April.
