(Bloomberg) — Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. is preparing to resume ticket sales for future space flights, seeking to maintain momentum toward commercial service amid widening losses.

Founded by billionaire Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic will begin taking $1,000 refundable deposits Feb. 26. It didn’t specify when it will resume selling seats, how many it will offer or what price it would charge. Given the demand, the market would bear a higher ticket price than the previous $250,000 for Virgin’s premium experience, Chief Executive Officer George Whitesides said Tuesday.

The plan to start accepting deposits again underscores Virgin Galactic’s effort to show Wall Street that affluent customers will pile in as the company tries to make space tourism a reality. While Virgin Galactic has become an investor darling this year, it remains a highly speculative stock and the shares fell after the company disclosed its fourth-quarter financial results.

Virgin Galactic reported a net loss of $72.8 million in the fourth quarter excluding foreign-currency adjustments, compared with a shortfall of $45.7 million in the same period a year earlier. Sales declined 59% to $529,000, which the company received for engineering services. Virgin Galactic ended 2019 with $480 million in cash and equivalents.

The shares dropped 5.4% to $32.15 in late trading in New York. Virgin Galactic almost tripled this year through the Tuesday close as investors bet on its ability to establish a new space-tourism industry and fly people across continents at hypersonic speeds.

A Boeing Co. unit invested $20 million in Virgin Galactic last year for a 1% stake ahead of an initial public offering.

The company has a group of 603 people from five dozen nations, dubbed Founding Astronauts, who purchased tickets as long as 16 years ago for as much as $250,000 each. Virgin Galactic suspended ticket sales in December 2018.

Customers paying deposits now would be first in line for new booking tickets. The next round of reservations are expected to cost more than the previous tranche, based on demand, company officials have said.

The top priority for this year is to fly Branson and significant work remains to be done, Whitesides said on a conference call with analysts and investors. Sales and cash flow will build in 2021 and the company aims to have a fleet of five spaceships by the end of 2023, he said.

Virgin Galactic has collected expressions of interest from nearly 8,000 people through its website, Virgin’s commercial director, Stephen Attenborough, said in an interview this week. That’s more than double the figure it reported late last year after becoming a publicly-traded company.

‘One Small Step’

The new initiative, called One Small Step, is designed to help the company increase its sales efforts and be “capable of delivering the numbers that we need,” he said. “We will be able to identify those people who are serious about purchasing a reservation, bring them into the family and create a pool of qualified” candidates to purchase a flight, Attenborough said.

“We have a really good number who are committed and transacted and that’s given us really good confidence that there is a readily addressable market for the product we are creating,” he said.

Beyond market demand, the New Mexico-based company must also determine the optimal size of its customer backlog once flights begin. The service is expected to start at a measured pace and then increase over time as Virgin attains operational insights and expands its spacecraft fleet.

If there are too few people in the backlog, investors may grow nervous. Too many could lead to logjams and frustrated customers, marring the company’s reputation.