NASA’s chief of staff to Administrator Charlie Bolden, George T Whitesides, has been named Virgin Galactic’s new chief executive officer. Between 2004 and 2008, Whitesides served as the National Space Society’s executive director. In 2007, whilst still in the role, he was invited to become Virgin Galactic’s senior advisor.

Whitesides said that he was extremely excited to be in a position where he could take Virgin Galactic from an experimental phase, to full scale commercial operations. He added that he would be able to take up his position with privately run Virgin Galactic, because he was not subject to any rules prohibiting a former government official from taking a job with a private company.

Currently, NASA and Virgin Galactic have no business links. However, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed in 2007, which means the two can explore the possibility of collaborations in the future.

Virgin Galactic aims to provide suborbital spaceflight on a commercial basis to paying customers. The spaceships are currently being designed by Scaled Composites, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. The designs are based on a prototype called SpaceShipOne, which in 2004, won the Ansari X Prize for completing a hat-trick of suborbital space flights. Test flights of Virgin Galactic’s VSS Enterprise are currently going on in California’s Mojave Desert.

More than 330 customers have already signed up for the $200,000 round trip to space, and have put down their $20,000 deposits, according to Virgin Galactic. Whitesides and his wife, Loretta, have already paid in full to be among the first to use the service.