Closed The Week At $9.46

Those who bought Virgin Galactic Holdings when it went public at the end of October hoping the stock would ... well ... rise like a rocket were disappointed when the price fell about 20 percent before recovering a bit by the end of the week.

After opening at $12.34 on Oct 28, the price did climb to $12.90 in about an hour before starting to decline. By Friday, the price had fallen to $9.12 at about 10:00 a.m., then began to rise. It ended the day at $9.64. It is the only publicly-traded space tourism company.

The blog Bezinga reports that analysts believe that the reason for the drop is that Virgin Galactic is still not actually flying people into space. That makes it difficult for investors to use normal metrics to measure the success of the company.

Not to say that people aren't interested in flying to the edge of space. The company has taken orders from some 600 potential astronauts willing to pay up to $250,000 each for the short ride. Virgin Galactic says the price will likely go up once it begins to take new bookings.

There is still not a hard timeline for the onset of operations by the company, though the VSS Unity spacecraft has conducted test flights to the fringe of space. Maybe once the first paying passengers are able to make the trip, the stock price will follow to the stratosphere.

(Image from file)

FMI: Source report