Richard Branson’s brainchild Virgin Orbit lays off 85% of its workforce

Rocket maker Virgin Orbit Holdings, a subsidiary of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, will lay off 85% of its workforce, according to an SEC filing.

The layoffs will affect 675 employees of the space company, according to the filing. The company attributed the layoffs to its inability to secure meaningful funding.

“On March 30, 2023, the Company announced a workforce reduction of approximately 675 employees, constituting approximately 85% of the Company’s workforce in order to reduce expenses in light of the Company's inability to secure meaningful funding,” the filing said.


The Long Beach, California-headquartered company incurred about $15 million in expenses related to the layoffs, out of which $8.8 million will be spent on severance payments and employee benefits.

The company got a capital infusion of $10.9 million from its parent company Virgin Group, to pay these immediate expenses.

Earlier this month, the company had paused operations for a week to save money while it “conducts discussions with potential funding sources and explores strategic opportunities”, it had told the US securities regulator in a filing.

CEO Dan Hart, in an audio recording of an all-employee meeting obtained by CNBC, said, “We have no choice but to implement immediate, dramatic and extremely painful changes,” according to US-based tech news platform TechCrunch.

This comes after the company failed to deploy its ‘Start Me Up’ satellite into orbit. The rocket was launched on a customised 737, which worked as a carrier aircraft, and took off from England’s Cornwall spaceport.

“The first-time nature of this mission added layers of complexity that our team professionally managed through; however, in the end a technical failure appears to have prevented us from delivering the final orbit,” Hart had said in a statement after the launch.

The company, which uses the unique method of releasing a rocket mid-air from a modified Boeing 747, went public through a SPAC merger in December 2021.