A longtime executive at Virgin Galactic is no longer with the New Mexico-based space company.
George Whitesides, the company's former CEO and chief space officer, "stepped down to pursue opportunities in public service," according to a company spokeswoman. Whitesides will continue to serve on Virgin Galactic's Space Advisory Board, which will provide advice to senior management as the company moves toward commercial operations.
Whitesides joined Virgin Galactic after a stint as chief of staff at NASA. He served as CEO from 2010 from 2020, when the company appointed former Disney executive Michael Colglazier to the position. Whitesides then stepped into the role of chief space officer.
The executive change is just the latest for Virgin Galactic, which announced the appointment of Doug Ahrens as its new chief financial officer before its quarterly investor report last month. That same day, it announced the appointment of Swami Iyer to president of aerospace systems and Stephen Justice as its new vice president of engineering.
The news of Whitesides' departure comes the day after Chamath Palihapitiya, the billionaire investor in Virgin Galactic, sold off millions of dollars worth of shares in the company. The selloff was worth nearly $213 million, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing from Thursday evening. The news also comes about one week after the company announced it was delaying its next attempt at a rocket-powered test flight from Spaceport America until May. The test flight will follow a previous attempt that was cut short in December.
The company's success, or lack thereof, could set the stage for the future of the Spaceport, which has been criticized for lack of activity. The more than $218 million facility houses several organizations, but Virgin Galactic is its anchor tenant. Virgin Galactic previously planned to launch its first commercial flight by last May, Whitesides said in 2019.
That same year, the Las Cruces-based company became the world's first publicly-traded commercial human spaceflight firm when shareholders in Palihapitiya's Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. blank-check company approved a proposed merger and $700 million investment. Another $100 million was to be invested by Palihapitiya. The deal came after the company announced it was moving employees to New Mexico.
Virgin Galactic has also considered other uses of its technologies, such as hypersonic flights, Business First reported.
