A Gilead scientist at the time, Jordan convinced the company seven years ago to let him assemble a library of 1,000 castoff molecules in a search for medicines to treat emerging viruses. Many viral illnesses threaten human health but do not attract commercial interest, because they lack potential for huge drug sales.

“I kept asking them, ‘Is this OK?’ ” said Jordan, who is now a vice president at a pharmaceutical start-up. “These don’t represent a commercial opportunity but a public health opportunity. Gilead gave me their blessing to do this on the side.”

To make progress, Gilead needed help from U.S. taxpayers. Lots of help. Three federal health agencies were deeply involved in remdesivir’s development every step of the way, providing tens of millions of dollars of government research support. Now that big government role has set up a political showdown over pricing and access.

Despite the heavy subsidies, federal agencies have not asserted patent rights to Gilead’s drug, potentially a blockbuster therapy worth billions of dollars. That means Gilead will have few constraints other than political pressure when it sets a price in coming weeks. Critics are urging the Trump administration to take a more aggressive approach.

“Without direct public investment and tax subsidies, this drug would apparently have remained in the scrap heap of unsuccessful drugs,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, chairman of the House Ways and Means health subcommittee, said this month. Doggett and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., have asked Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for a detailed financial accounting of federal support for remdesivir’s discovery and development.

The HIV-prevention advocacy group PrEP4All Collaboration, working with the Technology Law & Policy Clinic at New York University, released an analysis Monday that said the government, because it helped cull the drug from hundreds of compounds, probably has a legal right to claim it co-invented remdesivir. It contends that government scientists should have been listed as co-inventors on remdesivir patents because of their contributions. It says the Trump administration should be leveraging the government’s involvement to ensure that the United States and other countries can get access at a low cost.

“Agencies can’t just punt it over the fence to a pharmaceutical company and walk away,” said James Krellenstein, a co-founder of PrEP4All. “For the federal government to just walk away from that responsibility is a dereliction of the public trust.”

Two other nonprofit watchdog groups, Knowledge Ecology International and Public Citizen, also have documented the large taxpayer-funded contributions toward the drug. Public Citizen estimates public investment at a minimum of $70 million.

“Gilead did not make this drug alone. The public helped make it, and the public has a stake,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of the access to medicines program at Public Citizen.

Gilead has acknowledged the large role of government agencies in remdesivir’s development but said that the original compound was discovered by Gilead researchers years earlier and that the government has no potential patent rights to the drug. It has said it will spend up to $1 billion on remdesivir manufacturing and development in 2020 as it rapidly increases production and distribution around the world.

“We are focused on getting this treatment into the hands of as many patients as possible and making sure it is both accessible and affordable to patients in the United States and around the globe,” company spokesman Ryan McKeel said in an email. “We take that responsibility to patients and families affected by covid-19 very seriously and we will work to make sure access is not an issue.

“Gilead researchers invented remdesivir more than a decade ago, identified its broad-spectrum antiviral activity, optimized the formulation of the product and scaled up the manufacturing process,” McKeel said. “Although government funding was used to further characterize remdesivir’s profile after its initial discovery, this did not result in the creation of the underlying intellectual property invented by Gilead.”

The story of the drug’s creation shows that Gilead would not be commercializing the drug if it were not for the extensive involvement of government scientists and agencies. The industry-government partnership crossed the finish line this month when the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization clearing remdesivir to treat hospitalized patients with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Screening a huge number of chemicals for effective drugs is arduous work and often fails to produce a winner. In remdesivir’s case, government researchers narrowed the search from 1,000 compounds to the chemical that would become remdesivir, confirmed its potency in laboratory tests, tested it in monkeys, and finally sponsored a pivotal clinical trial in humans.

Jordan sent Gilead’s screening library to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and to Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, home to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Scientists at both federal facilities study dangerous viruses in high-security biocontainment labs. The National Institutes of Health and academic labs in Tennessee and North Carolina that receive NIH grants also would play key roles studying the drug in mice.

Front-line government scientists who worked directly with Gilead on the drug described the heavy involvement of federal resources in the drug’s development, though they said their concern at the time was not patents but speeding treatments in the battle against dangerous diseases, especially Ebola.

The former chief scientific officer at USAMRIID who supervised the development of remdesivir, Sina Bavari, said the team was working rapidly on a treatment for Ebola in 2014 and did not consider filing a patent application when the agency’s scientists helped discover new uses of the drug and tested it in government monkeys. Bavari and other government scientists were co-authors of an article in the scientific journal Nature that described its discovery and successful tests in the government’s rhesus monkeys.

Gilead contributed the drug and spent millions from its own budgets to hone the drug’s formulation, said Bavari, who now runs his own consulting company. Deciding when to file a government patent in the case of industry partnerships presents a “tightrope” for public health agencies that want to maintain positive relationships with industry partners, Bavari said.

Many antiviral drugs are taken for a short time and given to relatively few people. They do not represent large markets, so government subsidies are used to keep corporations interested in pursuing treatments, he said.

“Without incentivizing some of these companies to stay attached to emerging disease, I think they will walk away, even after this one,” he said. “In this situation [filing for a government patent] would have caused more harm with Gilead and not been worth it.

“The government’s job is to make sure industry is successful, and if industry is successful, then we all benefit from it.”

An Army lawyer said the Gilead drug did not meet the threshold of a government co-invention.

“Although USAMRIID performed extensive and critical screening and testing for Gilead, testing a compound and finding that it is indeed an effective antiviral compound does not qualify USAMRIID as a joint inventor of the compound,” Leigh Callander, chief patent counsel for the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command, said in an email.

An independent organization that measures the cost-effectiveness of drugs said Gilead could be justified in charging up to $4,500 for a 10-day course of treatment for a single coronavirus patient. But advocates, citing a study by academic researchers on what it costs to make the drug, have said Gilead could break even by charging $1 per dose.

The Department of Health and Human Services, in response to emailed questions, said it was too early to discuss pricing of remdesivir but noted that the government has reimbursed hospitals and other providers for the costs of testing and treating people with no health insurance. For those with insurance, many insurance companies have waived patient co-payments for covid-19-related care and therapies, it said.

“The Trump Administration is committed to ensuring Americans have access to life-saving therapeutics and vaccines as we combat this pandemic,” it said.

Gilead is donating the first 1.5 million doses to governments worldwide, which it said was enough for at least 140,000 patients through the end of May. More than half of that was targeted for U.S. patients. The drug is given intravenously in the hospital for five to 10 days. Gilead is investigating ways of making the drug in pill form, which could dramatically increase use – and sales – especially if the coronavirus lasts for years in the human population.

Because Gilead tackles viral targets, it has a long history of working closely with the CDC and the NIH to develop drugs for infectious diseases that other companies have shunned, especially HIV and hepatitis C. But Gilead’s pricing and intellectual property practices have drawn public and congressional criticism.

The company received negative publicity for pricing its hepatitis C drug Sovaldi at $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment in 2013. Last year, after a report in The Washington Post and congressional scrutiny, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to enforce a government patent on the HIV prevention Truvada for PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) after Gilead refused to recognize its legitimacy. As that court fight is being waged, Gilead continues to charge more than $20,000 a year for Truvada for PrEP. It said last year that it would donate 2.4 million bottles per year of Truvada through 2030 to contribute to a government plan to combat HIV.

Still, like other pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, behind the aggressive business and patent strategies are thousands of scientists who spend careers discovering and developing medicine to fight disease. Jordan said Gilead scientists volunteered to help him identify potential drugs in the company’s library that could interfere with viral replication.

Remdesivir’s parent compound GS-441524 was invented about 2009 when Gilead was looking for drugs to treat hepatitis C, according to Gilead.

In 2013, Jordan – who now works at Meissa Vaccines, a California start-up – included GS-441524 in the set of samples he sent to CDC scientist Michael Lo in Atlanta for testing against Nipah virus, a bat-borne disease found in parts of Asia. The compound showed promise not just against Nipah but also as a broad-spectrum antiviral. It interfered with virus RNA and stopped replication.

Lo “had a collection of human virus in the freezer and asked, ‘Do you mind if we try it against filovirus, Ebola?’ ” Jordan said. By that time, an Ebola outbreak had begun in West Africa, and labs around the world were scrambling to respond.

In 2014, Lo said he was examining a readout from the CDC’s laboratory tests of the compound showing that the drug had a strong effect against Ebola virus in lab containers.

“It was a very exciting moment,” Lo said. “We were the first to really identify that this compound had promise against Ebola.”

Lo said questions about government patents were not discussed at the time and said such decisions were “above my pay grade.” The CDC did not respond to a question about whether it considered filing a patent for the work of Lo and other CDC scientists.

Jordan also had sent the library to another agency with advanced capabilities to develop drugs for virus: USAMRIID, the lead unit for biological defense research in the U.S. military. Bavari said government scientists rapidly got to work conducting virus screening on trays of 384 chemical samples at a time. Bavari estimated that up to 15 government scientists at USAMRIID worked on the program.

GS-441524 stood out for its potent activity against Ebola virus, Bavari said.

“We started communicating back and forth with CDC and repeated the test. They had similar data,” he said. “It definitely was a breakthrough.”

Jordan said he went back to his superiors at Gilead with the laboratory data from CDC and USAMRIID screening tests as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa continued. The company’s interest in proceeding with a rapid development program was strong, he said.

“That launched a significant effort at Gilead to focus a lot of resources to developing this compound as quickly as possible and getting into patients as quickly as possible,” he said.

Gilead’s chemists in California took a crucial step toward making the compound work in animals and people: They turned the parent molecule into a prodrug, which means it is activated after it enters the body, and tweaked the compound further to make it more potent once it gets inside cells, Jordan and Bavari said. The result was GS-5734, later named remdesivir.

The next step by the government provided another vital milestone: Remdesivir was tested in government monkeys infected with Ebola at USAMRIID. When given within three days of infection to monkeys, the drug showed 100% efficacy against Ebola, the researchers found.

In humans, the drug was being tested by Gilead in healthy volunteers for safety by 2015, and the next year NIH tested it in Ebola survivors in West Africa. The NIH sponsored the next major step, a clinical trial in humans infected with Ebola in the Congo in 2018 and 2019. The drug performed worse than two other drugs and its use was stopped in the trial, but that did not stop federally sponsored research.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University and the University of North Carolina, with funding from an NIH-funded Antiviral Drug Discovery and Development Center (AD3C), studied how remdesivir performed against emerging diseases called severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

In addition to distributing grants and funding clinical trials, the NIH also has taken a direct interest in remdesivir. In a key federal animal trial that gave federal investigators greater confidence in the drug, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases tested the drug as a MERS prevention in government monkeys at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. The results, published this year, showed that monkeys given the drug did not get sick and had low volumes of virus in their lungs.

Once the coronavirus pandemic struck, the World Health Organization identified remdesivir as among the most promising potential treatments for the disease – raising hope for rapid help for sick patients.

The finish line came within sight with uncommon speed. NIAID sponsored a fast-paced clinical trial of remdesivir in more than 1,000 SARS-CoV-2 patients that began in February. (SARS-CoV-2 is the technical name for the novel coronavirus.) NIAID director Anthony Fauci – a top adviser to President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force – announced partial, top-line results from the White House on April 29: The drug shortened hospital stays by four days and reduced mortality from 11.6% to 8%, which was not considered a significant reduction in death, Fauci said.

Fauci said the results were modest. But, lacking any other treatments, he proclaimed the drug the “standard of care” for hospitalized coronavirus patients. Full results of the trial have not been released, and many questions about the drug’s effectiveness remain unanswered.

But Jordan, the former Gilead researcher who pulled the parent molecule out of the company’s library of compounds seven years ago, said he was happy with the results.

“I was very excited about that. This isn’t a home run. It’s clinical evidence that you can improve outcomes with an antiviral,” he said. “The fact that we can do something to this disease, that’s a great start.”

Backed by billionaire Len Blavatnik, shareholders of the New York-based record group behind artists such as Cardi B, Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars plan to sell 70 million shares of its Class A common stock priced between $23 and $26 a share — raising as much as $1.8 billion — according to a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

The offering consists entirely of secondary shares to be sold by Blavatnik’s Access Industries and certain related selling stockholders, the filing said. Warner Music won’t retain any of the money raised.

Music sales have surged in recent years thanks to the growth of paid streaming services from Spotify Technology and Apple. That’s boosted the value of music companies and enticed investors back to the record industry.

Warner Music initially filed for the IPO in early February, then shelved the plan in March as markets plunged in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. But as painful as the crisis has been in lost lives and broad economic disruption, it has also brought winners — including streaming companies. Spotify shares, for example, have risen 36% since Reuters reported that Warner Music would delay the offering.

Blavatnik, a Ukrainian-American, has a net worth estimated at $22.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He bought Warner Music for $1.3 billion in 2011, when the music industry was in the depths of a 15-year decline. Warner Music sales have climbed by 50% since 2015. The company reported net income of $258 million in fiscal 2019 on revenue of $4.48 billion.

Warner Music’s investors aren’t the only ones taking advantage of the industry’s resurgence. Vivendi SA agreed last year to sell a minority stake in Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company, to a group led by China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd. That transaction valued the business at 30 billion euros ($32.9 billion).

Warner markets its music through labels such as Atlantic Records, Warner Records and Parlophone. It also owns Warner Chappell, a music publishing business. While the labels work with recording artists, publishers represent songwriters. Songwriters signed to Warner Chappell include Lizzo and Katy Perry. Recorded music made up 86% of Warner Music’s sales last year, but publishing is a stable, profitable business.

Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse Group, and Goldman Sachs are acting as joint bookrunners and as representatives of the underwriters for the offering.

The Seattle-based company raised $50.5 million in a recent funding round led by existing investors, paving the way for an initial public offering within the next five years, Chief Executive Officer Daniela Braga said in an interview. The company declined to comment on its valuation.

“It’s the road to an IPO,” Braga said, adding her company’s ambition is to support the development of AI so that people eventually will “communicate with machines the same way we do with humans.”

Founded by Braga in 2015, DefinedCrowd curates voice and text data for clients including BMW and Mastercard to train virtual assistants and customer-service chatbots. The company designs the sets to be diverse and balanced, representing certain dialects or age ranges for audiences most likely to use the systems. Revenue grew 656% last year and is expected to triple this year, Braga said.

Once the pandemic subsides, Braga said she expects businesses from a range of industries – including telehealth and education – to build AI personal assistants to better serve customers, something that might require more specific data that incorporates an industry’s vocabulary.

Amazon, Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have come under fire over revelations they used recordings of customers’ interactions with virtual assistants to train their AI systems. A former contractor working on Apple’s Siri transcription project in Ireland last week complained to European privacy authorities over the “massive violation of the privacy of millions of citizens.” The companies said they’ve made changes to provide users with more control over their data.

By contrast, DefinedCrowd uses a crowdsourcing platform, Neevo, to generate data from a paid community of more than 290,000 members in 70 countries. Crowd members are asked to complete tasks like recording their voices or transcribing and annotating recordings rather than pulling data from customers who are using voice AI products.Braga said the newly raised funds will help the company expand its products and nearly double the number of employees in 2020. The company current employs around 268 people. Existing investors that participated in the funding round include Evolution Equity Partners, Kibo Ventures, Portugal Ventures, Bynd Venture Capital, EDP Ventures, and Ironfire Ventures as well as new investors Semapa Next and Hermes GPE.Amazon and Sony Corp., which is also an existing investor, didn’t increase their stakes in the latest round, Braga said, adding it was a strategic move not to increase the involvement of other companies as DefinedCrowd moves toward an IPO.

In the first part of the study, 130 healthy adult volunteers at two sites in Australia will get two doses of NVX-CoV2373, the biotech’s experimental vaccine. If the initial results look promising, the company plans to quickly move into the second phase of the trial, which would expand testing to other countries and age groups outside of 18 to 59.

Novavax’s valuation has swelled by more than 1,000% to about $2.7 billion since the start of the year despite having no products on the market. With about $388 million in funding from the Oslo-based Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations in its pocket, Novavax has said it is targeting emergency-use authorization and production could be scaled up to 100 million doses by year end.

“Our investment in Novavax allows us to focus on manufacturing in parallel with the clinical development of the vaccine, so that if the vaccine is proven to be safe and effective, we can make doses available to those who need them without delay,” CEPI chief executive Richard Hatchett, said in a statement.

The Gaithersburg, Maryland-based company is one of an estimated 10 that have begun testing vaccines for the pandemic in people, according to the World Health Organization. WHO estimates there are more than 100 other vaccine candidates in earlier stages of development. Moderna Inc. reported the first covid-19 vaccine results in humans last week.

Smaller vaccine developers are racing alongside larger, profitable drugmakers like Pfizer and AstraZeneca as well as academic institutions. Even if a vaccine is eventually shown to be effective, there will be hurdles to manufacturing as well as distribution.

With Novavax shares at the highest in over a week, B Riley FBR’s Mayank Mamtani said the stock could return to its May 15 record high, the analyst recommended buying shares ahead of the July results.

The European Commission wants Lufthansa to surrender the slots out of concern the aid will give the carrier unfair advantage over competitors, people familiar with the matter said.

After weeks of talks, Germany on Monday offered Lufthansa a package of loans and equity investment to keep the carrier aloft through the coronavirus storm. Officials in Brussels are concerned the deal will distort competition and fuel lawsuits from competitors like Ryanair Holdings, the people said. Approval of the deal could take several weeks, they said, asking not to be named discussing confidential deliberations.

To compensate for the state help, the European Union’s executive arm also would like the airline to decrease the number of aircraft based in Germany, the people said. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of conservative lawmakers the government would fight for Lufthansa to keep key slots, people familiar with the matter said.

“The discussions with the European Commission are continuing at full speed,” German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said Monday at a news conference in Berlin. “So far, we have managed to get approval from Brussels for all our aid requests during the corona crisis. How long it will take I cannot say, but the main point for us is that we want to achieve a good result.”

Lufthansa shares advanced on Tuesday, building on Monday’s 7.5% gain in the wake of the deal. As of 2:33 p.m. in Frankfurt, the stock was up 6%. Still, it remains down 44% for the year.

Analysts at Deutsche Bank said that while some of the terms of the German government deal were less punitive than expected, it would leave Lufthansa with high debt levels.

Still, the cost of protection against a default by Lufthansa touched its lowest level in a month, according to Bloomberg data. Bonds were mixed, with a hybrid note due in 2075 rising 3.4 cents to 79.3 cents, while the senior note maturing in 2024 fell 1.9 cents to 91.6 cents.

“Lufthansa still faces huge challenges, including the right-sizing of the company and difficult labor talks,” Societe Generale analysts Michael Kuhn and Sumit Mehrotra wrote in a note to clients. In addition to potential snags for the deal in Brussels, “the main profit driver, intercontinental traffic, will take a long time to recover.”

Airport slots are a crucial currency for airlines, providing them with the ability to operate flights at popular times and to coveted destinations. It’s a commodity that EU regulators have often asked carriers to cede to smaller rivals when seeking approval for mergers, including during Lufthansa’s 2017 takeover of a unit of Air Berlin.

While airport capacity is being under-used while Lufthansa and other airlines focus on survival, they will be back in demand once travel starts to recover.

Like airlines the world over, Lufthansa has been struggling to stay afloat after the coronavirus punctured a decades-long aviation boom. The company plans to operate fewer aircraft when flights resume and is closing discount arm Germanwings to resize for what it warns could be years of depressed demand.

The EU press office said it had no comment on the Lufthansa plan and was “in constant contact” with governments. It defended the need for “additional commitments to preserve effective competition” that are required for recapitalizations of more than 250 million euros to a company, according to an emailed statement.

“This is important to preserve the level playing field in the single market post-coronavirus crisis to the benefit of all European consumers and companies,” the EU said.

The Lufthansa package will be the first recapitalization to be weighed by the EU after it loosened rules this month that usually prevent governments from pumping money into favored firms. EU approvals for aid can be challenged and potentially overturned in the EU courts where Ryanair is also suing previous EU orders to allow airline aid.

Ryanair vowed to carry out Chief Executive Officer Michael O’Leary’s threat to challenge the German bailout, saying it could “further strengthen Lufthansa’s monopoly-like grip” on the German air travel market.

“Lufthansa can use this latest 9 billion euro subsidy from the German government to engage in below-cost selling on its short haul intra-EU routes and its long haul routes,” the company said in a statement. “How can airlines like Ryanair, EasyJet and Laudamotion be expected to compete with Lufthansa in the short-haul market to and from Germany?”

EU officials are aware of the need for speedy approvals, said Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s antitrust chief. Officials have been “working seven days a week around the clock” and at night “in order to make sure that things can be processed as fast as possible,” she told EU lawmakers on Monday.

The German aid package unveiled on Monday involves taking an initial 20% stake in Lufthansa that could rise to a blocking minority of 25% plus one share in the event of a hostile takeover. The support also includes a 5.7 billion-euro investment via a so-called silent participation — a debt-equity hybrid instrument that wouldn’t dilute shareholder voting rights. The state will also back a three-year loan of 3 billion euros.

As well as approval from the European Commission, the plan needs sign-off from Lufthansa’s supervisory board, and shareholders will have to vote on the capital increase at a special meeting, likely to be held in late June.

Lufthansa is also poised to receive some 2 billion euros in aid from Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, where the airline owns units.

Swiss state credit guarantees worth 1.28 billion francs ($1.3 billion) have already been agreed. Spohr is set to speak with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz this week to finalize an aid deal totaling about 600 million euros, equally split between loans and equity, according to people familiar with the matter. The Belgian package will be about half the size of the Austrian, plan, according to local reports.

The German package represents the biggest corporate rescue in the country during the pandemic crisis. It’s also the only one that involves a direct investment by Merkel’s government, but more may be coming. The government set up the 100 billion-euro fund to buy stakes in stricken companies as part of its effort to stabilize Europe’s largest economy.

The move was in line with a recent Cabinet resolution. The Central Bankruptcy Court will decide on Wednesday (May 27) whether it will take into consideration the option of THAI undergoing rehabilitation under the bankruptcy law.

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha on Monday also signed off the appointing of a committee tasked with following up on the airline’s rehabilitation.

The nine-member committee, chaired by Deputy PM Wissanu Krea-ngam, includes former finance minister Apisak Tantiworawong, Finance Ministry’s permanent secretary Prasong Poontaneat and Transport Ministry’s permanent secretary Chaiwat Thongkamkoon.

The committee represents the government in following up on the airline’s rehabilitation under the court’s supervision as well as give advice to related state agencies in solving THAI’s problems that are not related to the court process.

Warangkana Kanlayanapradit, NMG’s assistant chief executive officer, said the money from the sale will be used to pay off debts and improve the company’s financial structure.

NMG also acknowledged that NBC will buy all shares in Green Net 1282 Co Ltd (GNET) from News Network Corporation Plc (NEWS), as well as assume the responsibility for its outstanding debts, for Bt250 million. The purchase is expected to be completed by November.

NMG also reported the resignation of Sonthiyan Cheunruthainaitham as second vice-president and member of the board, effective from June 1.

Kom Chad Luek is a mass-circulation Thai-language daily launched in 2001 and published in Bangkok by the NMG. The company announced the paper would cease publication on April 8, 2020, citing pressure from changes in the media landscape and the economic environment. Kom Chad Luek has now transformed into an online news platform.

With an hour’s advance order online, by email or phone, freshly prepared, healthy meals can be picked up at the hotel’s doors from 11am to 6pm on any day, the company added.

The diverse seasonal offerings include groceries such as garden-fresh vegetable boxes, premium meats and ready-to-eat artisanal Western and Thai sauces.

A variety of oven-baked loaves of bread includes mini baguettes, country bread, multigrain, foccacia as well as other bakery items from the hotel’s kitchens. Desserts include lemon meringue tart and apple cinnamon crumble tart.

Pre-cooked meal plans are also offered with choices of clean food and low-carb meals as well as vegetarian options, according to the hotel.

A Boeing Co. 747, named Cosmic Girl, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California on Monday at 11:56 a.m. Pacific time, carrying beneath it Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket over the Pacific Ocean. About an hour later, the plane released the rocket in what Virgin Orbit called a “clean” release. Three minutes later, the company said the mission had ended shortly into the flight.

There have been more than 20 previous tests, including one earlier this year carrying the rocket, but this was meant to be the first time LauncherOne had been ignited. Earlier this week, Virgin Orbit described Monday’s test as “the apex of a five-year-long development program.”

“We’ve confirmed a clean release from the aircraft. However, the mission terminated shortly into the flight,” the company tweeted Monday. “Cosmic Girl and our flight crew are safe and returning to base.”

Before Monday’s attempt, Virgin Orbit said maiden flights by government and commercial providers fail about half the time. The company’s ultimate goal is to use its rockets to launch small satellites into space, competing with ground-based launches, such as those from Space Exploration Technologies.

SpaceX has a significant head start. Over the past decade it’s launched about 100 rockets, landed many of them safely back on Earth, and come to dominate the industry, while being valued at close to $40 billion. In a few days, SpaceX is set to carry two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station – the first time NASA personnel have blasted off from the U.S. since the 2011 retirement of the Space Shuttle.

Meanwhile, the Virgin Orbit test this holiday weekend comes at a critical time for Branson as the coronavirus pandemic weighs heavily on his leisure and travel assets.

The Virgin Australia airline fell into administration last month, and Virgin Atlantic pitched to about a dozen potential investors last week as the U.K. government drags its heels over an emergency bailout.

Branson’s Vieco 10 investment company also recently offloaded about 2% of its stake in a separate space company, Virgin Galactic Holdings, as the billionaire looks to support his broader business empire. Virgin Galactic is trying to pioneer space tourism.