Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:SPCE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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And I hope you have a chance to come do this. It is just super meaningful to even watch. But then not only the friends coming to watch, that’s the best chance we have to convert somebody is bringing friends to watch and your friend or your family member goes and you see what this is about in person, it is very compelling to then want to move those people forward. And then, the next piece of that is, when you’ve had a meaningful experience at this level of depth and emotion is much easier to become missionary and a passionate ambassador for our company going forward. And that’s where you really get the multiplicative value to us. That’s where you get lifetime value of an individual customer, but also through them bringing in new people into our community.

So those are — I’ll call it, the direct side. As we graduate people into the Astronaut Community, we absolutely are going to look how to curate that for additional value to those, now Virgin Galactic, Astronauts, but also, of course, driving value to the company. So we’re just starting to build that community up, but I have a lot of high interest and engagement of what we can do with a very kind of passionate and deep allegiance to the company group of people like that.

Oliver Chen: Okay. That’s really helpful and innovative. Last question, the Spaceship factory is on track to open in mid-2024. I mean in the past, there were supply chain disruptions, of course, and timing and also cost and time and money. What’s ahead with that in terms of what you’re monitoring? Is that enough cushion in terms of what you see in the current environment with availability and the flexible arrangements you’re using as well? Thank you.

Michael Colglazier: Thanks, Oliver. So we’ve got a team on the program management side of this, I’ll call it more so than the engineers per se and our supply chain team, these groups are pros. And the big thing that’s going on now, of course are scanning out the long lead items. And there’s a little bit of whackable with that, but we whack down things when we see those things pop up. And by having our Delta design be a derivative design, not a brand-new thing, it’s a derivative design of the work that we’ve done in the past. We know what those long lead items are. And so we’ve got the time to be out searching and adapting as we need to. We’re working with really seasoned partners in Bell and Qarbon, they’ve been incredibly responsive.

We’ve started to bring some of their team members and leaders out to see our spaceflights. I think it’s really important that those teams feel part of our team and feel part of the emotion and the huge value of doing this. So that helps us build kind of cultural momentum there as well. And it’s a collective effort. So I — this is an Aerospace project, and there’s always things that are popping up, but we’ve got the right focus and the right team and the right buffers built into our plans and schedules that we feel good on them. And we’re going to continue to manage day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month on that.

Oliver Chen: Thank you. Best regards.

Michael Colglazier: Thanks, Oliver.

Operator: There are no further questions at this time. This will conclude today’s conference call. We thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.

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