William Elliott Whitehorn OBE (born 1960) is a British business executive. Until December 2010 he was President of Virgin Galactic,[1] a company which plans to offer space tourism flights to the paying public.[2] He was formerly the President of the industry group,UKspace,and has been Chancellor of Edinburgh Napier University since 2021.[3]
Whitehorn's early career was as a crewman on North Sea helicopters and also with the Thomas Cook travel agency. In 1987,Whitehorn joined Virgin Group after being talent-spotted by Sir Richard Branson,after he had suggested a number of ideas to Virgin the previous year. He rose to become the head of Virgin's public affairs department.[when?] In that role,where he was effectively the official spokesperson for the company,he was sometimes characterized as Branson's "right-hand man".[2]
From 2007 to 2011 he was president of Virgin's space program,Virgin Galactic,[5] but left owing to the relocation of the testing area.[citation needed] Since 2011 he has been a non-executive director of Stagecoach Group,where he was appointed Deputy Chairman in 2016,and he has the same roles at Good Energy.[5]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
