Stephen Attenborough is the Commercial Director for Virgin Galactic, a company mainly owned by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group which is on track to become the world’s first passenger carrying commercial spaceline.

Stephen joined Virgin Galactic as the company’s first full time employee in 2004 to put in place the commercial foundations of the business. He now leads a team in London that covers sales, marketing, customer care, PR and communications for the space tourism business.

As well as having put into place the commercial foundations of this amazing new business, the team has taken a large number of firm bookings and deposits from some of the 70,000 people from 123 countries who have registered as potential Virgin Galactic astronauts.

Stephen also is responsible for workstreams that are investigating the non-tourism applications for the new space vehicles, particularly science research. During 2009 and 2010 he was a part of the deal team which secured Virgin Galactic’s first external equity partnership with a sale of 32% of the company to Abu Dhabi’s AABAR Investments PJSC for US$280m, valuing Virgin Galactic at around US$900m.