Branson’s Virgin Orbit backs DC area-headquartered imagery firm

Ahead of the listing of its stock, Sir Richard Branson’s space launch company Virgin Orbit has already moved on an investment in another business that gives it access to another portfolio of technologies.

Virgin Orbit said Wednesday it has agreed to acquire n 17.5-percent in Hypersat, a geospatial analytics company focused on satellite imagery for customers in the defense and other government-influenced sectors. Terms were not disclosed.

McLean, Virginia-headquartered Hypersat will use Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket as the launch platform for a six-satellite constellation currently being built by a QinetiQ-led team that also includes Redwire, Millennium Engineering and Integration and Brandywine Photonics.

That constellation will provide electro-optic and hyperspectral imagery to government and commercial users that seek to capture and process the images at wavelengths across the entire reflective spectrum, which would enable precise identification of items on the ground.

“Hypersat has a great technology solution and an excellent developing capability that meshes well with our other space solutions to provide a complete package of useful data to drive critical decisions,” Virgin Orbit Chief Strategy Officer Jim Simpson said in a release.

Virgin Orbit is of course founded and shaped by Branson, who started the company in 2017 as one of three businesses focused on various aspects of space. Virgin Orbit focuses on small satellite launch and was originally part of Virgin Galactic, which centers its strategy around space tourism.

Virgin Orbit is led by CEO Dan Hart, who joined the company in 2017 after a three-decade career at Boeing where he was most recently vice president of government space systems.

In August, Virgin Orbit agreed to merge into special purpose acquisition company NextGen Acquisition Corp. and that transaction will turn it into publicly-traded entity listed on the NASDAQ stock market.