Branson, and 4 entities he controls together with Virgin Group, offered 5,584,000 shares of Virgin Galactic between April 12 and 14. The shares had been value $150.3 million, offered at costs between $26.85 and $28.73.

Virgin Galactic didn’t instantly reply to CNBC’s requests for remark. Virgin shares closed Wednesday at $26.68 up 12% for the yr.

Branson’s sale comes a month after Virgin Galactic Chairman Chamath Palihapitiya offered his remaining private stake within the firm. Palihapitiya informed CNBC on the time that he plans to redirect the sale “into a big funding I’m making in direction of combating local weather change,” including that he stays “as devoted as ever to Virgin Galactic’s staff, mission and prospects.”

Final yr, because the COVID-19 pandemic broken Virgin Group’s leisure and journey companies, Branson offered about $500 million of his stake in Virgin Galactic.

The house tourism firm is working to finish improvement of the spacecraft that it plans to make use of to fly individuals to the sting of house and again. Virgin Galactic suffered a setback in December, when electromagnetic interference precipitated an early abort of its most up-to-date spaceflight try – with the subsequent try anticipated in Could.

The event delays have pushed again Virgin Galactic’s deliberate debut of its house tourism service, with CEO Michael Colglazier saying the corporate doesn’t anticipate to start flying business flights till early 2022. Virgin Galactic expects to fly 4 extra spaceflight exams with its “VSS Unity” spacecraft, together with flying Branson this summer season.

Final month Virgin Galactic rolled out “VSS Think about,” the second spacecraft in its fleet, and the primary of its next-generation class of automobiles.

“For us to make the enterprise begin to scale, on the locations that we’re aspiring in direction of, we want two issues: We’d like many extra ships than we’ve got proper now and we additionally want the ships that we convey ahead to be in-built a method that they are capable of be maintained in a method that we are able to have a lot faster [turnaround times between flights] than what we’ve got with Unity,” Colglazier informed CNBC in March.