Fully six years before, in the summer of 1999, Steve had been having dinner at the Flying M Ranch with his host, Barron Hilton, and Burt’s brother Dick Rutan, a test pilot and the man who, with his partner Jeana Yeager (no relation to Chuck), had circumnavigated the world in a plane, nonstop and without refueling, in 1986.
Dick and Jeana had spent nine days in an unpressurized cockpit three and a half feet wide by seven feet long. The flight had damaged their hearing, and the project as a whole frayed their relationship to nothing. (Plenty of people in this book paid the ultimate sacrifice for their adventures; everybody in this book paid something.)
At the dinner table, Dick’s enthusiasm for record-breaking aviation—and for the materials his brother was using on new aircraft—remained boundless. He reckoned that it would now be possible to fly around the world in a fraction of the time taken by the original Voyager. It might even be possible to do a solo circumnavigation . . .
Steve listened, spellbound: the last great aviation record left inside the earth’s atmosphere! The first great aviation achievement of the twenty-first century!
The following August, Steve went out to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for the annual Experimental Aircraft Association “AirVenture.” This is America’s largest aviation meeting, and it attracts about a million visitors each year. Steve wasn’t there just to rubberneck (though, knowing Steve, he most likely crawled over and into anything with wings); he had a meeting planned with Burt Rutan. Burt needed seed money. There were a couple of projects he was trying to get off the ground. He offered Steve a pilot’s seat on a spaceship for $7 million and the chance to circumnavigate the world solo for $2.5 million.
Steve was awestruck. A spaceship?
Burt explained the X Prize: a $10 million prize for the first private company that could haul a vehicle past the Kármán line into space, twice, in the space of a fortnight.
Steve swallowed. “And the other thing?” He later regretted not seizing both opportunities, but I think he chose well. SpaceShipOne needed a test pilot; the GlobalFlyer needed an adventurer.
There aren’t many people capable of sitting in a space the size of a coffin for four days, let alone without sleep, let alone at the controls of a more or less unproven aircraft. Psychologically, Steve was the right man. He was even then attempting (six times, in the end) to be the first person to fly around the world alone nonstop in a balloon, a journey that would eventually take him 14 days and 19 hours. Gregarious and cheerful, he was, at the same time, perfectly content with his own company. Solitude held no terrors for him.
Not long after his meeting with Burt, Steve took part in a sailing regatta near my home in the Virgin Islands. He called me up and invited me to join his crew for the race. (Steve always knew how to pique my interest!) Later, he showed me the plans for his plane, then called Capricorn. The basic design decisions had already been made. Dick and Jeana’s Voyager had been driven by two propellers; the new plane was powered by a single jet engine, designed by Dr. Sam Williams. This in itself was very good news. (Williams is a book in himself: blind since youth, he handcrafts what many say are the most beautiful engines ever built.) The more Steve told me, the more excited I got.
For a start, it was a terrific adventure. Even better, it could help revolutionize the air industry.
The importance of Capricorn—later to become the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer—lay in its construction. The airframe was to be made entirely from composite materials.
Composites are any construction materials that are made of two or more distinct substances webbed together. When you pour concrete around a mesh of steel reinforcing rods, you’re making a composite. Mix mud and straw for bricks and you’re making a composite (a good one at that; in some environments, mud bricks stand up to the weather better than concrete). When you paint epoxy resin over a mat of glass shreds to fix the hole in your boat, you’re creating a composite called fiberglass.
The kinds of composite Burt Rutan developed at Scaled Composites are descendants of the kinds of material regularly used by model makers and glider manufacturers: glass, resins, foam cores, and fillers. Composites like these are as strong as the strongest metals and much, much lighter. If you could build a passenger jet of composite, you would save huge amounts of fuel.
The question is: can you?
There was no way Virgin Atlantic was ever going to build its own passenger planes, of course—that particular approach to the business disappeared well before the Second World War! But we could, by our efforts and investments, encourage Airbus and Boeing to take composites seriously.
Long-haul passenger planes are the most complex machines ever constructed, and right now Boeing and the European consortium Airbus make most of them. Being far and away the market leaders, and being very big, complex organizations, both companies tend to be very conservative. In some ways this is a good thing. We put our lives in their hands every time we step aboard one of their planes, and we expect their machines to be tried and tested. The downside, however, is that Boeing and Airbus find it difficult to innovate. They leave it up to their customers to work out precisely what they want them to make.
Well, Virgin Atlantic was their customer. As I talked to Steve Fossett, I realized that by backing his project, we could demonstrate exactly the sort of plane we wanted to fly from now on.
The Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer would carry more than four times its own weight in fuel. Its three-body layout spread the weight of the airplane across the wing. Sam Williams’s engine was built around a conventional jet engine, computer-controlled and with a contoured, high-efficiency fan carved from a single block of titanium. The airframe was woven from glass, graphite, and aramid and bonded with epoxies and resins. Once heated, this composite material became immensely strong and far lighter than aluminum. The controls were conventional—the last thing Steve needed was some fly-by-wire malarkey sitting between him and his plane’s control surfaces—but the control and communications systems were sufficient to hold Steve in the air while he grabbed the occasional two-minute nap. Computer-aided design had refined the aerodynamics of the plane, making it far superior to the 1980s-vintage design of Dick and Jeana’s Voyager. The flight plan took advantage of the jet stream, giving GlobalFlyer a staggering 75 percent more range than anything previously achieved by jet-powered airplanes. We reckoned that, with the angels on our side, our plane could make it around the world.
The question was, could Steve?
It was a freezing evening on Monday, February 28, when the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer took off from Salina, Kansas. The flight did not go smoothly. What does? First, Steve’s GPS navigation system went out. Without it, he couldn’t possibly meet the waypoints required to authenticate his flight with the World Air Sports Federation (FAI), and earn his world record. I remember a strained conversation: me in the relative comfort of the chase plane, encouraging him to fly on for the sake of the project; Steve, depressed and frustrated, wondering whether he shouldn’t just turn back. And just then, as if by a miracle, the GPS rebooted!
The following morning, a much more serious problem came to light. Steve’s cabin, like every other pressurized airplane cabin, was kept at an even pressure by the plane’s engine. Were the engine to fail, the cabin would depressurize and Steve would have to reach for his reserve oxygen supply. Only he didn’t have one: on climbing into the craft the previous day, he’d knocked over his emergency-oxygen switch. Sam’s engine not only had to get him around the world; now it had to keep him alive.
The Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer: around the world on one tank of fuel.
The next problem was farcical. Virgin Atlantic pilot Alex Tai, flying our chase plane, came in close to take pictures. We had been doing this without trouble since the beginning of the flight, but suddenly the backwash from Alex’s plane swept over Steve’s left wing and disrupted the area of low pressure that was keeping it up in the air. When a wing comes unglued from the airflow in this way, we say it has “stalled,” and a stalled pl
ane has the aerodynamic properties of a brick. Steve, fighting to stay in the air, gave poor Alex a hell of a mouthful—Alex all the while capturing the exchange on film!
By now Steve was flying very confidently. Time for the next really serious problem to emerge. Over the Persian Gulf, Steve learned he had lost more than 2,000 pounds of fuel. It had somehow dumped through the vents during his initial climb. Low on fuel, and with no oxygen reserve, Steve had no choice but to hold on and hope, the roar of Sam Williams’s jet engine his only real companion.
At last, on March 3, 2005, Steve Fossett nursed the world’s most revolutionary aircraft onto the tarmac at Salina, Kansas—the very spot from which his voyage had begun. He had not run out of fuel, and he had not needed any emergency oxygen.
Waiting on the tarmac to greet him was another amazing aircraft—the Cayley Flyer, shipped over from the United Kingdom and flown, that day, by Allan McWhirter, the gliding expert who had helped with the restoration and, two years earlier, had tried his level best to teach me how to fly the thing.
“Sir George Cayley was a true pioneer in his day,” I told assembled journalists, “just as Burt Rutan is in the modern day. The technologies used in the design and development of the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer will help shape the future design of commercial aircraft.”
At the time, few in the press appreciated the technical work that had gone into the GlobalFlyer or understood its significance. But times have changed.
In 1906, the Swedish physicist Svante August Arrhenius published Worlds in the Making, the first account of the “greenhouse effect.” He was the first person to predict that emissions of carbon dioxide from burning would cause global warming.
The air around us is warmed by the sun. The air is made up of water vapor and many different gases, and they all heat up at different rates. Carbon dioxide heats up quickly, but it doesn’t hold on to this heat indefinitely. Some heat escapes into space, and some of it is reflected back by the earth and reabsorbed by the atmosphere. So carbon dioxide works like a blanket. The thicker the blanket, the warmer the earth.
Arrhenius thought the greenhouse effect would turn out to be a good thing. The more humans there were, the more carbon dioxide there would be in the air, the warmer the earth, the faster things would grow—which in turn would allow the increasing human population to feed itself. Arrhenius’s description of a feedback loop between human activity and climate change sounds startlingly modern, except in one crucial respect. He estimated that carbon-dioxide levels were doubling every 3,000 years. Today they’re doubling every century.
Humans today are responsible for only 5.5 percent of the planet’s total CO2 emissions. Humans pump 30 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere every year; living things as a whole pump out a staggering 550 gigatons. The trouble is, the feedback loops that maintain our climate are exquisitely sensitive. Fractional changes in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere are enough to change our climate forever.
We know, for sure, that human beings are changing the climate. This surely can’t come as a surprise. What other species do you know that starts fires? We burn stuff. We have done so for around 1.8 million years. There are many more of us now than there were 1.8 million years ago. We burn stuff and use the energy to power our industries. Most of these industries are essential: they keep us alive. Burning stuff cleans our drinking water, it cultivates, distributes, and prepares our food, it clothes and cleans us and makes our medicines.
So it’s not so surprising to learn that an industry like aviation—an industry we could conceivably do without—generates only 2 percent of all industrial emissions—or less than 0.5 percent of human carbon emissions taken as a whole. Another industry we could conceivably do without is information technology. You may feel this would be harder for us to sacrifice; so you won’t be surprised to hear that IT releases twice as much carbon into the air as aviation. The industries that make a huge difference to our carbon output are the ones essential to life.
I believe that industries like aviation can actually provide us with the solution to global warming, by developing the technologies that the really vital, dirty industries like agriculture and power generation can then adopt and adapt for themselves. This is why I committed to plowing our share of the profits and dividends from Virgin’s transport businesses into initiatives such as the Virgin Green Fund, which invests in and develops new forms of sustainable and renewable fuels and energy sources. The real, global benefits will come once other industries take what we have developed and make it work for them. And let’s be clear about the scale of the problem: reducing the amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere may not be enough to save us. If James Lovelock’s right, we will actually have to take carbon out of the atmosphere!
According to Lovelock, if we want to maintain our current climate, we will have to start capturing more carbon than we emit. So the Holy Grail for us right now is a commercially viable product that takes carbon out of the atmosphere. It’s essential that the product not only works, but makes good business sense. Good ideas are never enough. They have to catch on. They have to make sense not just to you and me but to people all over the world, regardless of whether they believe in global warming or not, regardless of whether they care, regardless of whether they know carbon from a hole in the ground.
On February 9, 2007, I announced the Virgin Earth Challenge: $25 million will go to the individual or group that demonstrates a commercially viable design that will result in the net removal of atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for at least ten years, without harmful effects. The Virgin Earth Prize is the largest purse in history.
The GlobalFlyer, the Green Fund, and the Earth Challenge were the headline-grabbing parts of a strategy Will Whitehorn and I have been developing for the Virgin Group since the early 1990s. We didn’t begin it out of a concern for the environment. Back then we were much more concerned about the survival of Virgin. The rocketing cost of aviation fuel had gotten us spooked; we realized that our long-term success depended on our coping with high fuel prices.
The first thing we did was calculate when the oil was going to run out. More accurately, we worked out when there would be no more cheap fuel. (There will always be fossil fuels somewhere under the ground, but they won’t always be the sort that are cheap to extract.) Thanks to the work of an expert called Jeremy Leggatt, we came up with a date that, at the time, no one else believed. We put our money on 2015.
As the years have gone by, we’ve had more accurate figures to work with. The global recession that began in 2008 has slowed consumption slightly. But our original figure has hardly budged: by the middle of the decade, if not before, the oil we have left under the ground will become much more expensive to extract. Other forms of power will be cheaper.
Together with a few other companies, including Stagecoach, Scottish & Southern, and Arup, we formed a task force to study the issues around Peak Oil and have produced two reports encouraging the government to speed up the development of the United Kingdom’s renewable-energy capabilities.
At Virgin we’ve gone all out to develop companies and infrastructure that will operate well in a low-carbon economy. The other day, for example, I proposed a £1 billion investment in the British rail system, taking to the next stage the low-carbon technology already in proven service on the United Kingdom’s West Coast Main Line.
This isn’t the place to go into more detail—if you’re interested, my book of business advice, Business Stripped Bare, has some more information. Suffice it to say, from the middle of the decade, we’re going to be living in a lower-carbon economy whether we like it or not. The question is: what’s this economy going to look like? Will our future have smart grids and wind turbines and next-generation nuclear power stations and solar panels and well-insulated houses and synthetic fuels and miracle batteries? Or will it have rising infant mortality, social decay, and global water wars?
I know these are heavy matters to bring up in a book that’s about adventures in aviati
on. But I want to show you how our industry and our brightest minds are reacting to the crisis. If this were just a matter of lighter planes and better fuels, it wouldn’t make much of an adventure story. The reality is much more exciting, and much more controversial. There’s a revolution going on in aviation, and a new race for space, and I think these changes and experiments may just hold the key to our future.
ten
Back to the Future
It was 1984, and I was poring over every conceivable detail of my new airline, Virgin Atlantic. We were decorating the upper-class lounge in Heathrow, and we needed something for the walls. I decided that we’d put up pages from a comic I remembered reading as a child in the 1950s: stories of a future in which men and women flew into space aboard ships not much bigger than Second World War bombers; where ordinary men and women were pioneers and explorers, and outer space offered people prosperity and freedom.
I remember walking into the lounge when it was done and being confronted with these lovely color reproductions of my childhood hero, Dan Dare, in his boiler suit and fishbowl helmet. I remember thinking: “This isn’t enough.”
Just over a decade later, the excitement around private space was heating up and Will Whitethorn and I wanted to know what was out there, so we set up Virgin Galactic. The company was, at this stage, little more than a formality—a way of keeping the Virgin Group paperwork straight. Virgin Galactic was Will and me wandering around the Mojave Desert in our shirtsleeves, talking to a bunch of rocket nuts.
One day in March 1999, Will went off to register the name. He called me later the same day. “Richard, you didn’t tell me.”
“What?”
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