Reach for the Skies

by Richard Branson

  Then he crashed it. It wasn’t a bad crash—more of a hard landing—but it broke the left landing strut. This close to the X Prize flights, Brian believed he would never be trusted behind the controls again.

  Mike Melvill reckoned Brian deserved another chance. He worked out a way of setting the controls of another Rutan airplane—the Long-EZ—in such a way as to perfectly simulate the landing behavior of SpaceShipOne. Mike and Brian even cut out cardboard masks to give the Long-EZ cockpit the look and feel and restricted view of the SpaceShipOne cabin. Now it was up to Brian.

  Eighty-four approaches and landings later, Brian was ready, and Mike said so, long and loud. The day after Mike’s successful X Prize flight, Burt announced the name of the second pilot. Brian Binnie was going to earn his wings after all.

  On October 4, 2004, Brian took SpaceShipOne nine kilometers (5.6 miles) farther than Mike had, set a new altitude record for a rocket plane, and won the X Prize.

  “I’m not at all embarrassed that we’re opening up a new . . . multibillion-dollar industry that’s focused only on fun.”

  Burt Rutan

  Virgin Galactic’s job is to turn the incredible intellectual achievements and acts of personal heroism we’ve seen lighting up the skies of Mojave and elsewhere and turn them into a business. In April 2005, Burt Rutan spoke to U.S. lawmakers about our plans: “I’m not at all embarrassed that we’re opening up a new . . . multibillion-dollar industry that’s focused only on fun,” he told a congressional committee. Every new technology goes through an early, playful phase. Personal computers started life in amusement arcades. The first helicopters were propelled by rubber bands. The first airplane-propulsion system was a child’s fist. The first passenger-plane journeys were joyrides that landed from where they took off. Right now, space’s playful phase is taking two forms—and we reckon only one of them has a future.

  Some companies are saving money and development time by using twentieth-century technology—rocket boosters and the like—to blast people into space at their own risk. Either the journey will be astronomically expensive—the Soviets offered to take me to the International Space Station for a princely $30 million!—or it will be unsafe and uncomfortable. One Danish outfit I know of is offering to strap you inside a capsule the size and shape of a coffin, from which you will be able to squint at space through a Plexiglas porthole!

  The rest of us have made for ourselves much more work, but our approach will, we believe, create a sustainable market, giving us a real future in space. We are developing technologies safe enough to offer passengers the same warranties as any other travel company.

  Burt wrote: “We believe a proper goal for safety is the record that was achieved during the first five years of commercial scheduled airline service which, while exposing the passengers to high risks by today’s standards, was more than 100 times as safe as government manned space flight.” Doing this costs money—so no one should be too surprised by the high price tag of our initial flights, or too worried. Once we’re up and running, we want to push the fare down as far and as fast as we can. Of course we do: we’ll make more money that way. There’s no point being an industry leader unless you put your industry within people’s reach.

  Burt and his team are working to hand-build our launch system. I do mean hand-build: there’s a lovely clip on YouTube showing the fuselage of Virgin Enterprise being assembled. It’s so light, when they need to move the thing, the crew simply picks it up and walks! In such a learn-as-you-go endeavor, things get tried, then changed, then tried again. This is why we never put firm dates on anything. Our WhiteKnightTwo, christened Eve after my mother, has already flown, and it’s likely that we’ll be flying paying passengers by 2011 or 2012. We’ll be the first to do so, and for a long time we’ll be offering our passengers the best experience money can buy.

  Our competitors are working hard, and they have their own ideas about how this business will develop, which makes comparisons among us difficult, if not impossible. When Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, NASA astronaut John Glenn said, “Now that the Space Age has begun, there’s going to be plenty of work for everybody.” Let me introduce you to a few of the hardest workers.

  When their beloved Heath-Robinson space helicopter failed them, Rotary Rocket went through an extraordinary transformation. A bunch of engineers and project heads rethought their dreams of space travel from the ground up and came up with Xcor Aerospace, a company that makes cheap, reliable engines and intends one day to use them to put a rocket plane into suborbital space.

  People say Xcor is our closest competition. This is unfair to Xcor, since it implies that it’s a kind of cut-rate Virgin Galactic. Consider: they’re charging less than half the price we’re charging, for a shorter flight, on a less powerful spacecraft called the Lynx, for less time, and with no opportunity to float around in zero gravity . . . All this is true. But the more differences you list—Xcor’s passenger gets to wear a spacesuit, while Virgin Galactic’s passengers don’t have to; Xcor’s passenger sits beside the pilot and gets a wraparound view, while Virgin Galactic’s passengers float around a cabin looking out of portholes; and so on—the more you realize that comparing such unlike offerings is really rather silly.

  Xcor made the difference between us explicit in February 2009, when they announced that their $95,000 tickets would not take you past the Kármán line—or, indeed, anywhere near it. Rather than take you into space, Xcor wants to give you a thrilling X-15 experience. They’ll give you a pilot’s-eye view of the earth some 40 miles up, followed by a thrilling 4-G descent back to Earth. A Lynx flight is not a cut-price anything, but a brilliantly conceived ride in its own right.

  Is it enough to sustain them in business? We have our doubts, but the honest answer is that nobody knows. Xcor’s business model is quite different from Virgin Galactic’s. Xcor doesn’t want to be a travel company. It’s a spacecraft manufacturer. It will lease its Lynx planes to whoever wants to operate them. If rides on the Lynx fail to capture the public imagination, Xcor will take a big hit—but it will probably live to fight another day. Because Xcor concentrates on manufacturing planes, it can mix and match its technologies to build new craft to satisfy new markets as they emerge. The Lynx itself grew out of a racing jet built for a new sport-aviation venture called the Rocket Racing League. And Xcor fully intends to build an orbital spaceplane—using mostly Lynx Mark I parts—once there’s an operator around who might start leasing such a vehicle.

  Xcor has taken the giant leap into orbit, and they’ve broken it down into chunks. They plan to get into orbit one small step at a time. It’s a fascinating idea: a sort of privatized version of the USAF’s X-Plane program, and very much in the homebuilt spirit.

  Xcor is taking small, sensible steps into space. Elon Musk, who made a fortune from the sale of the Internet company PayPal, doesn’t have their patience. He set up Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX for short) with just one aim in mind: getting to Mars.

  Then he discovered that launching his beloved Mars lander would cost two and a half times more than building it. The truth emerged: nothing will ever come of our dreams of space until we have developed a cheap launch system. Elon has since spent around $157 million of his own money developing cheap rockets. It was money well spent. The going rate for launching a payload into orbit is currently around $40 million. SpaceX can do it for less, using its super-reliable Falcon 1 rocket.

  This kind of operation sounds miles away from the homebuilt scene; but appearances are deceptive. When Elon went in search of a chief engineer, he went first to the Reaction Research Society. Founded in the 1940s, the RRS is America’s oldest rocketry club. Some of the brightest aerospace minds in the United States are members. The RRS introduced Elon to Tom Mueller. After countless nights and weekends tinkering about in his garage, Mueller—a propulsion engineer at the California firm TRW—had just relocated to a friend’s warehouse, where he was putting the finishing touches on his invention: the world’s lar
gest-ever amateur liquid-fueled rocket. Spacecraft don’t get more homebuilt than this!

  When Elon visited Tom and saw what he was working on, he had only one question: “Can you build something bigger?” Today, Tom Mueller has a new job title—possibly the coolest ever conceived. He is SpaceX’s vice president of propulsion.

  Just before Christmas 2008, Tom and SpaceX got their big break, winning a $1.6 billion deal to resupply the International Space Station when NASA retires its space shuttle. It’s a brave decision by NASA: if SpaceX delivers late, then only the Russians will have the ability to maintain the station. But it’s the right decision. A space-shuttle flight costs three to four times as much as a Falcon flight, and its safety record is, to say the least, poor. NASA is finally coming to grips with the fact that it’s far better off putting orbital operations out to pasture.

  Coming up with countless small innovations in suborbital and near-orbital space is the sort of thing private companies, in competition with one another, can do extremely well. Like Britain’s Royal Aircraft Establishment during and after the Second World War, NASA is at its best when it thinks in the long term. The nuts and bolts of its enterprise are much better left to the private sector. It’s a tragedy that NASA’s fascinating and valuable planetary flybys, mapping missions, Mars landings, and all the rest have had to be conducted on the slenderest of shoestrings, while billions are swallowed by projects like the International Space Station—structures that are obsolete even before they are complete.

  What of SpaceX’s ultimate ambitions? It rather gave the game away when it started putting windows in its cargo capsules! SpaceX engineers reckon a crew of seven could travel comfortably into orbit aboard their new Falcon 9 rocket, due to launch in 2010. All they need is somewhere to visit.

  Enter Robert Bigelow.

  Robert has some unorthodox ideas about how to spend the fortune he made from his hotel chain, Budget Suites of America. In the spring of 1999, he came across an article about a radical new kind of space station called Transhab. A Transhab space station is made of inflatable modules. They’re big, and they fit together: two of them boast an interior volume greater than that afforded by the International Space Station. A year later, when the U.S. Congress killed the program, Robert stepped in. To say that Robert’s suddenly declared interest in space came as a surprise is putting it mildly. “I didn’t even tell my wife,” he remembers. “She never knew. Because it’s possible that that kind of dream would never happen.”

  In July 2006, a one-third-scale test module called Genesis I was carried into orbit on a Russian rocket. It was filled with mementos belonging to Bigelow Aerospace employees. It unfurled, powered up, and sent video pictures back to Earth, from inside and outside the module. When I first saw these pictures, I couldn’t decide which was more moving: the spectacular view of our Earth from orbit or the photographs of children and loved ones I glimpsed spinning weightless in their new home, high above the earth. Genesis II was successfully launched on June 28, 2007, carrying trinkets from visitors to the company’s Web site.

  An artist’s (rather earnest) impression of life aboard a Transhab module.

  Robert’s plan is to launch a fully operational, inflatable space station into orbit as a destination for space tourists by 2012. A four-week stay will set you back $15 million—that’s half the price the Russians wanted to charge me to visit the ISS. Right now, what he needs most urgently is a way of getting his clients into orbit and aboard his hotel. He needs commercial orbiters. His Space Prize—announced just a month after Brian Binnie flew SpaceShipOne to X Prize glory—offered $50 million to anyone who could build a credible private shuttle.

  The prize has yet to be claimed.

  Epilogue

  Joyriding

  “What is the use of a newborn child?”

  Benjamin Franklin, on being asked what was the

  point of the Montgolfier brothers’ invention

  On Thursday, June 16, 1960, Joe Kittinger got his wish.

  The ace American test pilot, whose love of free-falling and parachuting had put the fear of God into David Simons’s Manhigh team, was finally ready to pull the ripcord on the grandest, craziest, most dangerous high-altitude experiment ever conceived.

  The U.S. Air Force project, called Excelsior, was begun in 1958, to test pressure suits and ejection systems for pilots traveling in the upper stratosphere. Without some kind of pressurized life-support system, ejecting from a plane at such heights meant no chance of survival. Even free-falling wouldn’t bring you down quickly enough into safe, breathable air. (Kittinger’s own assessment: “You’re gonna be a dead son of a bitch.”) So Excelsior designed and tested gear to keep pilots alive outside the earth’s atmosphere.

  They developed the first space suits. Like most prototypes, they were cleverly designed, lovingly crafted, and not very reliable.

  Kittinger piloted all the Excelsior flights, culminating in Excelsior III, which launched on August 16, 1960. The ascent—achieved, as usual, with a Winzen-designed helium balloon—was flawless. At 50,000 feet, however, Kittinger noticed that his suit had sprung a leak. When he squeezed his right hand into a fist, the glove offered no resistance. Now he could feel his hand begin to swell. He had no way of telling how serious the leak would become. Soon his hand would lose all function. Then what? He thought, quite simply, that he was going to die.

  The ground crew, listening to Kittinger’s reports from the edge of space, intuited that something was very wrong. Kittinger was a joker, and here he was extemporizing a sober and beautiful poetry. At 103,000 feet, with 99 percent of the earth’s atmosphere below him, he declared: “As you look up the sky looks beautiful but hostile. As you sit here, you realize that man will never conquer space. He will learn to live with it, but he will never conquer it.”

  By now his right hand was useless: a balloon. But he was still alive, still able to conduct the experiment to which he and the Excelsior team had devoted years of their lives. What else could he do? He dragged himself to the opening of the gondola. He could see the earth curving below him, wrapped up in a thin blue trace of sky. “Lord,” he said, too soft for anyone but the flight recorder to hear, “take care of me now.” And he jumped.

  People like Joe Kittinger make the future possible. Without Joe and people like him, there would have been no American space program, no visits to the moon, no space station, and no Hubble Space Telescope. There would be no space industry, and our ideas—even the modest pleasure rides of Virgin Galactic—would be mere pipe dreams.

  Closer to home, the same truth applies: without the bravery and skill of SpaceShipOne’s test pilots Brian Binnie and Mike Melvill, there would be no Virgin Enterprise. It’s Virgin Enterprise that will be carrying Virgin Galactic’s passengers into space and offering a view of the earth as it really is: a living, independent thing; a ball without borders.

  Those passengers, too, will be pioneers, as surely as was Amelia Earhart when she rode (like “a sack of potatoes”) across the Atlantic in 1928. At $200,000 a ticket, our astronauts are bankrolling the first-ever commercial spaceliner—and then staking their lives on its safe operation.

  Virgin Galactic’s ticket prices will drop as the years go by. As we clock up more flights, public trust in the system—already the most thoroughly tested system in the history of commercial aerospace—will increase. At what point will our pioneers consider themselves mere “passengers”? Not, I’d wager, in my lifetime. Space is big and empty and waiting for ideas. It is our new frontier. Those who fly with us will do so because they have a vision of what the future might hold there. Who knows which of these visions will be realized by my children’s generation?

  A decade from now, Virgin Galactic flights will be regular, if not commonplace. Picture it: the year is 2020 and we’re coming in to land, lining up with the airstrip at Spaceport America, in New Mexico. The terminal building bulges out of the desert like a great, blue, unblinking eye. It screams the future. It is beautiful, but it is not su
btle. It is a building Dan Dare might recognize. Why not? This is Dan Dare’s future we’re building here, after all: a future in which everyone has a chance at space.

  We’re making our final approach now. Imagine: the plane bucks as it descends through fierce thermals rising from the desert floor. Then it steadies, cushioned by a few final feet of warm, steadily rising air.

  In the beginning, virtually everyone flew here by private plane. The communications weren’t great: there was no public transport and not nearly enough demand for any. This is changing. Since we dropped the ticket prices—imagine this—we’re starting to carry passengers from more ordinary walks of life; people who are staking their life savings on a trip into space. These are not people who habitually charter their own aircraft. These days we pick up many of our passengers in limousines from the airport at Las Cruces.

  Then there are the sightseers: people who have come from all over the world to watch our launches, as weekend vacationers once flocked to Croydon to watch film stars, dignitaries, and politicians board the first-ever passenger services across the Atlantic. Most of these people drive to see us, and already a handful of bus companies are operating sightseeing tours. How long before Spaceport America needs a railway station?

  Our plane is still riding its warm-air cushion. Desert landings are famously drawn out, as though the air were determined to keep us aloft. As we hurtle past the terminal building (just how long is this runway, anyway?), we catch our first glimpse of the machine that will carry us into space. Imagine two corporate jets stuck together at the wing tips. This is WhiteKnightTwo, Virgin Galactic’s first stage. This plane will carry us to more than 50,000 feet as we sit in SpaceShipTwo. Then, like an eagle dropping a tortoise, it will let us go . . .

  Our wheels hit the tarmac at last. The aircraft shivers and trembles. Imagine it: built entirely from composite—a descendant of the Virgin GlobalFlyer—it’s lighter than planes used to be and feels every ripple in the tarmac surface. The engines cut out and the electric front wheel powers up, rolling us in virtual silence back to the terminal. There’s that WhiteKnightTwo again. From here, against the backdrop of the desert, and with nothing familiar to compare it with, it looks impossibly small. Curiously doubled up it may be, but in essence, it still looks like a business jet.