Boeing has filed a lawsuit against Virgin Galactic, accusing Sir Richard Branson’s space tourism firm for unlawfully retaining trade secrets.
In 2022, Virgin Galactic and Boeing announced a partnership to work on the former’s new mothership.
Now that the partnership has ended, Boeing claims Virgin Galactic should delete all trade secrets it had shared with the company.
Virgin Galactic is still working on the new mothership, which will help launch a space plane to the edge of space. In its new court order, Boeing seeks to block Virgin Galactic from using proprietary data shared between the two companies.
Boeing’s lawsuit against Virgin Galactic
On Friday, March 22, Boeing filed its lawsuit against Virgin Galactic. In its complaint, it accused the space tourism firm of “retaining, using, and threatening further use of trade secrets” that belong to Boeing and its Virginia-based subsidiary, Aurora Flight Sciences.
Boeing was helping Virgin Galactic design a new mothership to succeed its current VMS EVE mothership.
VMS Eve carries the company’s VSS Unity space plane to an altitude of 44,500 feet (13,500 meters) for release. VSS Unity carries Virgin Galactic’s paying customers, who shell out as much as $450,000 for a trip.
Virgin Galactic is currently developing its next-generation space plane, called Delta, as well as its new mothership. Both are designed to help Virgin Galactic scale up its operations and fly more often.
However, Virgin Galactic and Aurora’s partnership did not go as planned. Boeing’s lawsuit claims that Virgin Galactic kept intellectual property that it was contractually obliged to delete.
“Boeing developed these trade secrets over decades of engineering, testing, building, and flying aircraft,” the complaint states. “Virgin Galactic’s ongoing, unauthorized retention and use of these trade secrets to develop a new Mothership deliberately deprives Boeing and Aurora of their exclusive property rights and imposes irreparable harm by risking exposure to other competitors, after which the information cannot retain its secret status.”
Virgin Galactic denies wrongdoing
Unsurprisingly, Virgin Galactic claims that Boeing doesn’t have a case and that it has done nothing wrong.
A report by Gizmodo quotes a Virgin Galactic representative saying Boeing’s lawsuit is “wrong on the facts and the law, and we will vigorously defend ourselves in the appropriate forum.”
Virgin Galactic has launched seven commercial space tourism missions to date. Its latest launch, in January, marked the first time private astronauts occupied all four seats aboard VSS Unity.
