In fact it’s so exciting that if we weren’t wretchedly poor we’d all start signing up for it; meanwhile people with money are chucking it at Branson full of the aforementioned childish excitement. There’s the passangers, each of whom have paid $200,000 to go into space (and who one woman in the promotional video hilariously describes as coming from “all sorts of different backgrounds” – different yet uniformly loaded, obv). But also spending is the reliably cash-happy lot over in the Middle Eastern emirates, with the Abu Dhabi state-controlled investment company Aabar Investments taking a 32% stake in the company yesterday. The company is chaired by Sheikh Mansour, a man not known for scrimping on his hobbies – maybe he’ll be signing up for some zero-gravity action himself, just to properly survey his ever-spreading empire.

Whitehorn made their $280m contribution sound pretty big news: “It completely funds the project through to commerciality”, he said; Branson is also apparently mooting a stock market floatation for the company to push the funding through. Whitehorn also cited Abu Dhabi’s “strong ambitions in developing science within the emirate” – what with this and their massive push on alternative energy with the Masdar initiative, Abu Dhabi is really starting to think outside the hydrocarbon box. Their investment will go towards a side element of the program, the launching of satellites, which could provide Virgin Galactic with a revenue stream outside of passenger tickets and therefore Aabar with a more diverse investment. Nevertheless, Virgin Galactic is still a niche brand, and given its riskiness when factoring in the new technology and small customer base, it’s a risky investment. 

Meanwhile yesterday also saw Branson jolly about for the first time in White Knight Two at an airshow in the States; its the mothership that carries the spacecraft towards space. It’s like Branson and co have even thought about the poetic rhythm of the mission, calibrating it to be as emotionally and visually stirring as possible. The mothership drifts up, lets the spaceship fall for a couple of seconds before its single booster engine blasts it at the heavens – Hollywood couldn’t make a more satisfying spectacle if it tried. Console yourself by attacking the massive hubris of rich people polluting the environment to provide themselves with an elite experience, boo at the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on entertainment for a few hundred people – but admit it, you really want a go.

It’s going to go under an Initial Public Offering, ie on the stock market, which seems weird considering that the markets’ moods are less predictable than a teenager’s at the moment, and no-one’s been doing any IPOs over the last few months. But the floatation won’t happen until 2010, so it’ll get a headwind of hype and excitement, maybe even a bidding war from buy-out firms prepared to pay over the eventual valuation. Given the popularity already of the Skype iPhone app, we can presume that the brand will be all the stronger come next year. Though Martin Peers at the Wall Street Journal suggests that growth will be limited thanks to calls being free, and that given Skype made $116m profit last year, the $1.7bn that eBay will want for it seems like a lot.

Even if they do get that much for it, it’s still a hefty loss for eBay on their original investment. eBay has also just announced it’s selling back web recommendation service StumbleUpon to its original owners, after they bought it for $75m back in 2007. “We realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses”, said StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp. So “lack of synergy” seems to be a running theme here – eBay, flush from its brilliant core business, thought it should and could move with the times, or at least be seen to be doing so. But now they’re having to turn back to the auctions, something they should never have strayed from in the first place.

eBay resisted a buyback offer from Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who look like an attendee at a caravan trade show and a trance producer respectively; they had pulled together a group of private equity firms to fund the purchase. The Guardian suggests that thanks to a beef over the Global Index technology that the pair licence to Skype, eBay is snubbing Zennstrom and Friis with the IPO. Take that, Scandos!

Maybe Zennstrom and Friis can now concentrate on turning the Joost platform they invested in into a viable TV equivalent of fellow Scandinavian ad-funded success story Spotify. At the moment it’s good for cartoons, the softest of porn, and little else, but surely has the potential to be massive. Maybe they could try and steal the music video market off YouTube while it festers in copyright law hell?

UBS are predicting massive loss of $5.50 a share, shocking when you consider that a poll of analysts by Reuters just last month suggested Goldman would earn $1.62 a share. They’re currently selling at $63, a fall along with the rest of the banks this week (though the market picked up yesterday), but at least it’s better than a couple of weeks back, when the price went below $50, lower than the price it was originally sold at for its IPO. If that doesn’t say “the dream has died”, I don’t know what does.

Goldman became a common-or-garden bank this year, out of concern that, post-Lehman, just being an investment bank might not be very stable. The FT reports today that it’s still at the cutting edge of investment though – they’ve created a new, credit-crunch-flavoured business model for investing in the pharmaceutical industry. Rather than pump cash directly into a single company, whose drugs may or may not make it through the hoops to market, Goldman is now suggesting a “research pool” where different companies would share resources to make the financial impact of drug development softer.

And in other Goldman news, its new commercial bank arm needs a chairman, and it looks like they’ve got one in the form of Gerald Corrigan, former head of the New York Fed (the same position that Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, held until recently). Corrigan has been managing director of Goldman since 1996, so it’s not really earth-shattering news to be honest. But we can wait and see whether Corrigan, whose risk assessment skills helped Goldman avoid subprime troubles and once won him “Risk Manager Of The Year 2005″ (sick!) will get his wallet out amid the crisis and buy another bank in order to increase customer numbers…