萝莉视频

What happens when you smoosh together a SPAC and a space tourism company? Well, as it turns out, $SPCE happens.

Let me explain.聽

A SPAC is a 鈥渟pecial purpose acquisition company,鈥� a public entity that is designed to buy a company that is, say, private, taking it public in the process. Investors put money into a SPAC when it goes public, and then the entity — a formless slug of cash in search of something material to glom onto — buys a chunk of another company that has yet to go public itself.聽

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The result of this transaction is that, presto, the private company is now public with little of the usual irksome oversight that comes with filing an S-1.聽

Space?

Now, space tourism. Not much of an industry, yet, but something that folks think is going to be big. If you鈥檝e ever read science-fiction you鈥檝e read about taking off from a planet and experiencing weightlessness. That鈥檚 the draw.

Space tourism in our lifetime probably won鈥檛 get much further than that, but there鈥檚 a good chance that if you have more money than you know how to safely handle than there鈥檚 also a good chance you can afford to go to space for a few minutes before we recycle you back into the Earth.

Indeed, here鈥檚 the current market for space tourism, through the lens of , a company we鈥檒l come back to:

Hundreds of people from 60 countries, including actor Leonardo DiCaprio and pop star Justin Bieber, have paid or put down deposits to fly on one of Virgin鈥檚 suborbital flights.

Some of Virgin Galactic鈥檚 ticket holders have been waiting over 14 years for their trip. A 90-minute flight, which allows passengers to experience a few minutes of weightlessness, costs about $250,000.

Cool.

Back to our SPAC. The SPAC we care about, , was put together by tech鈥檚 . Palihapitiya is most famous for from his time at Facebook and founding , a venture firm that made some interesting deals and later wound up seeding the rebirth of . Regardless, his SPAC announced in June that it would 鈥渋nvest roughly $800 million in Virgin Galactic for a 49% stake,鈥� .

And that鈥檚 what happened this week. The combined entity now trades under the symbol $SPCE and is a public company.聽

Snark aside, it鈥檚 pretty neat: You can now go invest — for under $11! — in a space tourism company. See, 2019 isn鈥檛 all bad. Just mostly.

Illustration: .