There’s new drama in the space industry. Boeing filed a lawsuit against Virgin Galactic, accusing it of retaining trade secrets that the two companies had exchanged while working to develop a new mothership, which never came to fruition. On Friday, Boeing asked a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, to issue a court order blocking Virgin Galactic from further using proprietary data that was shared between the two companies as part of an agreement in 2022, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit claims that Virgin Galactic kept intellectual property related to the development of the mothership, refusing to honor a contractual promise to destroy two sets of trade secrets. “Boeing developed these trade secrets over decades of engineering, testing, building, and flying aircraft,” the complaint read.