The owner of commercial spaceflight firm Virgin Galactic has said he intends to make it a publicly traded one.

Richard Branson says the company has taken a "huge step towards becoming the very first publicly listed human spaceflight company" - along with its sister manufacturing organisation, The Spaceship Company.

Any such move would make Virgin Galactic available to equity investors.

It comes after Social Capital Hedosophia has announced it will merge with Virgin Galactic.

Founder and CEO, Chamath Palihapitiya, is to invest an additional US$100m (€89.2m) and become chairman of the combined entity.

The boards of directors of each company have approved a deal, under which both firms will merge.

The current shareholders of Social Capital Hedosophia expect to own up to approximately 49% of the combined firm.

Mr Branson says: "This achievement is being made possible by joining forces with a New York Stock Exchange-listed investment vehicle, which has many underlying investors, but led by two visionary business leaders, Chamath Palihapitiya and Adam Bain.

Richard Branson with the VSS Unity | Image: Virgin Galactic

"Having got to know Chamath and Adam over the past few months, I have no doubt that we will be better together and am delighted they are becoming such important partners on our amazing journey.

"Together we will make our dreams reality."

He also says that opening Virgin Galactic to further external investment "has been on the cards for a while."

Citing "great progress in our test flight programme", he says this means the remaining hurdles to commercial space travel "are steadily being cleared."

"Having sadly had to pull away from an investment by Saudi Arabia after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and then having demonstrated the repeatability our full flight profile with two crewed spaceflights, we had an opportunity to rethink our investment plans", Mr Branson adds.

A spacecraft was launched by Virgin Galactic, successfully flown into suborbital space and back to Earth in December 2018.

Virgin Galactic says it already has customer reservations from more than 600 people in 60 countries, representing approximately US$80m (€71.3m) in total collected deposits and US$120m (€107m) of potential revenue.

It has also been granted a commercial space launch licence from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US - and a New Mexico spaceport has received its spaceport licence.