Reach for the Skies

by Richard Branson

  The sleek, brash lines of Spaceport America wrap themselves around the plane as we near the gate. We come to a standstill and the door opens. The spiced, superheated smell of the desert penetrates the cabin. We’ll walk to the terminal; this is not a big place (yet), and there’s no need for a shuttle bus.

  In the evening, we dine with our fellow astronauts. We’ve shared briefing sessions, and we’ve been through the same mild medicals, but this is the moment we really bond, as we contemplate tomorrow’s flight. Everyone’s nervous, so there’s plenty of gallows humor. Some wag reminds us of that great newspaper quip, made long before Virgin Galactic started operating: that with a propulsion system powered by rubber pellets and laughing gas, at least we’ll all die laughing.

  The truth is, people have died to make systems like ours possible. Tried and tested technology is exactly that: someone has tried it and someone has tested it. On July 26, 2007, Eric Blackwell, Glen May, and Todd Ivens died, and three others were badly injured, when part of an experimental propulsion system blew up in their faces. The accident was not caused by a mistake or an oversight. It could not have been predicted or prevented. It took Scaled and the regulatory authorities months of painstaking study to even begin to understand what had gone wrong.

  The bottom line is that the men and women of Scaled and other research-and-development companies test their ideas against the world. This is their job and their passion. It’s what gets them up in the morning. But the world does not care about passion or goodwill, and it does not pull its punches. When an engineering experiment fails, the result is usually frustration and wasted time. Sometimes, financial trouble follows. Now and again, the price is exacted in lives.

  None of which makes for a comfortable night’s sleep. Virgin Galactic’s Spaceport is a luxurious place to stay, but it will be a special person indeed who gets a full eight hours’ rest tonight. Maybe you have ice water flowing through your veins. Maybe you’re like Gordo Cooper, who actually fell asleep as his Mercury-Atlas 9 counted down to liftoff. More likely you’ll need some kind of sedative, even if it’s only hot milk. Per and I used to take sleeping tablets before our balloon flights. Even Joe Kittinger accepted sedation the night before his extreme balloon ascents.

  Nothing you try seems to make any difference. After half an hour’s tossing and turning, you get out of bed and write some letters to your loved ones. You go over to the window. It’s a full moon tonight. Picture it: for all the many robots crawling about its surface, for all the recent manned missions (China is due to make footfall again in 2020; Russia in 2024), the moon remains mysterious and haunting. In October 2009, a probe called LCROSS smashed deliberately into the moon’s surface in a hunt for ice. Amateur astronomers saw the flash through their telescopes. That flash—that instant of faltering connection—took nothing away from the moon’s mystery. If anything, the mystery deepened. How strange that we can cross hundreds of thousands of miles of nothing and find ourselves, at last, touching another world! One day the moon will sparkle. Cities will etch the new moon’s outline. These city lights may even be visible to the naked eye. When that happens, the moon will seem more mysterious, not less: how strange that men and women should be living upon the ball of rock that makes the oceans swell and the tides turn!

  Watch this space: Spaceport America is now under construction.

  Moonstruck, you cease to worry about sleep. And that, of course, is the moment you drift into dreams.

  Morning comes as a surprise. Today is the day. Today—after only you know how many years of dreaming and striving and saving—you will climb into SpaceShipTwo and, for a few precious minutes, leave the planet behind.

  After a light breakfast, we dress in lightweight flight suits and prepare for takeoff. The cabin of SpaceShipTwo is fully pressurized throughout the flight, so you don’t need to wear any heavy or cumbersome gear. All we ask is that you leave your jewelry in your room, since we don’t want loose items flying around the cabin during free fall.

  On the apron, our WhiteKnightTwo is waiting. If it seemed small yesterday, seen from afar through a plane window, it looks gigantic now. Its wingspan is massive—about the same as a Second World War B-29 Superfortress bomber; added to which, it’s acquired a payload. Between its twin fuselages hangs a SpaceShipTwo, a strangely bulbous 60-foot-long spacecraft with curious, articulated wings, fully fueled and ready to blast us into space from a height of about 53,000 feet.

  If the outside of SpaceShipTwo looks alien and unlikely, the interior is strangely reassuring—at least I find it so. It looks like something out of the 1960s, hovering somewhere between a 2001 film set and an Austin Powers outtake. There are portholes everywhere—in the ceiling, walls, and floor. The seats are scooped and sculpted, more like shells than airline couchettes.

  The interior is not quite the retro design statement it appears to be. Its shape was dictated by 101 very real challenges. Among the most important: how do we give six passengers freedom to roam the cabin during free fall without having them end up in an ungainly heap on landing? How do we give everyone a decent view of the earth, regardless of the pitch and angle of the spacecraft? How, above all, do we create a safe, comfortable, roomy interior that is, at the same time, light enough to blast into space?

  Much of the design work I see being done in the commercial space sector has this retro quality, and for a very good reason: most new things draw inspiration from old ideas. The first hang gliders would not have baffled Leonardo da Vinci. The first moon rockets would not have puzzled Robert Goddard. Long before we had the right materials to build with, we were drawing up this future for ourselves.

  We have reached WhiteKnightTwo’s optimum operating altitude: somewhere between 48,000 and 52,000 feet (we choose the best ceiling on the day). Without drama or fuss, and almost casually, our mother ship lets us go. SpaceShipTwo drops through the air, a powerless, ballistic mass. A second later, a fierce roar erupts around us as our rocket ignites. Flaming nitrous oxide sprays the rubber lining of our fuel tanks, turning it to gas. The gas escapes: our rocket hurtles forward and up, right through WhiteKnightTwo’s flight path and into the purple spaces above the stratosphere.

  The acceleration is sharp and sustained, but not painful. There’s room to breathe and room to think. There’s room to look through the portholes at a sky turning second by second from blue, through indescribable violets and indigos, to black. Who will spot the first star?

  There’s room, too, to remember. Here, at this altitude, David Simons spent a day cramped into the world’s first space capsule, watching thunderheads gather below him. Here Mike Adams’s X-15 touched the edge of space then tumbled back into the earth’s atmosphere side-on, and flew apart: poor Mike didn’t stand a chance.

  Here, right here, at this very height, is where Joe Kittinger jumped.

  It took Joe and the 320 pounds of extra gear he was wearing nearly a quarter of an hour to fall 19½ miles to Earth, 27 miles west of Tularosa, New Mexico. He punched the ground and sprawled there, a horrible, dusty heap, as helicopters screamed to the scene. As the medics ran up to him, Kittinger managed a smile, dragged himself to his feet, and headed over, unassisted, to the press conference. As he spoke to the waiting reporters, the swelling in his right hand gradually subsided.

  Twenty-three years later, Kittinger’s right hand was as hale and hearty as the rest of him (incredibly, the limb, though exposed to the vacuum of space for several hours, made a complete recovery within hours). He was still flying, and he was still setting records. He set a new gas-balloon world distance record in 1983 and, the following year, was the first to solo across the Atlantic, in Rosie O’Grady’s Balloon of Peace. In 1998, he helped Per, Steve, and me plan our round-the-world attempt.

  He never fulfilled his grandest ambitions. He never made it into space on a rocket, and he wasn’t the first to solo around the world in a balloon. But he’s not one to brood. Since retiring from the USAF, Joe Kittinger has returned to his roots, and for more than 20 years he’s b
een skywriting, towing banners, and flying balloons. He’s been barnstorming, hurling thrill seekers about the sky in biplanes, and he says the smiles he gets from them are the smiles he remembers from the fairs of his boyhood as people queued up in droves for their first taste of the air.

  His preferred airplane is a New Standard D-25 crop duster and mail carrier. Built in 1928, it is exactly as old as he is.

  It’s easy to become impatient in this business, easy to complain about the slow pace of change, especially when so many changes are so desperately needed. Waiting around for synthetic fuels to be developed that are genuinely kind to the environment; hoping against hope that Virgin’s airlines can one day take delivery of lightweight, all-composite jetliners—waiting for these things, year after year after year, drives me to distraction. Then I remember Joe Kittinger, born in 1928, who test-flew the first space suit in a 20-mile free fall over the New Mexico desert. I remember my own mother, doling out oxygen masks to her passengers as her Avro Lancastrian rose above the Andes. I remind myself that the entire history of powered, heavier-than-air flight is not much more than a century old: its span is not much greater than one human lifetime.

  What wonders will our children live to see?

  At an altitude of 68 miles, SpaceShipTwo tops out of its curve, above the Kármán line. The weight of the earth falls away as the ship describes its slow parabola. It is time, at last, to stop thinking. It is time to release that belt buckle. It is time to fly.

  Here is the earth—see it through that porthole. It is vast. It is not the mere marble in space that so awed the Apollo astronauts. We have barely left our mother planet’s arms. We have barely dipped our toe into the ocean that awaits us. These, make no mistake, are the shallows. Enjoy them. Your next flight will take you farther. Bigelow’s hotel has been open for business for years now, patiently waiting in orbit for a spaceship to dock and disgorge its first tourist. One day you will travel farther still and visit the moon—not for pleasure, this time, but for business: you have helium-3 to mine, Mars rovers to build, cities to survey.

  Crossing the line: Brian Binnie’s view of the earth from SpaceShipOne.

  It all depends, I suppose, on how young you are. It all depends how much of a lifetime you’ve got left, and how you want to spend it. Because this is beyond doubt: there are wonders for the taking up here—if not for us, then for our children.

  Picture a world recovering from blight and pollution, its feverish climate cooled by solar shields, its cities and industries powered by solar energy gathered by collecting surfaces in orbit. Imagine taking heavy industry off the planet entirely and into orbit. Imagine never having to launch another rocket; imagine dangling cables from orbit instead—great ropes of artificial spider silk, or carbon nanotubes. Imagine catching an elevator into space!

  Not one of these ideas is new. Most have been around for an eternity. Space elevators were first proposed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895. Every one of these ideas is brought closer to realization, year after year, by the development of new materials. Carbon nanotubes are a laboratory reality. The super-lightweight reflective material we need for our giant space mirrors has been commonplace for a while now. We currently make potato chip bags out of it.

  Why, anyway, do we always end up talking about the future of space? Our present uses of space are extraordinary enough, and we don’t celebrate them nearly as much as we should. Following our balloon crossing of the Pacific, Per and I were incredibly lucky not to freeze to death on our lake in the Canadian Rockies (a place they’ve since rechristened Branson Lake!). The rescue beacon we had installed in our capsule was state-of-the-art, but back then these systems talked not to satellites but only to passing aircraft. If a Canadian Air Force Hercules hadn’t been within range, we’d have been waiting a lot longer than eight hours to be picked up. These days, were I cast upon a desert island, I could use my mobile phone to bounce a distress message off a passing satellite, and use the same GPS function to look for water sources from space while I was waiting for my rescuers to arrive. Once back in civilization, my phone could point me toward a decent lunch in virtually any city on earth.

  Satellite communications have the most obvious, direct effect on our day-to-day lives. But industries other than telecommunications rely much more profoundly upon satellite technology. Take the always vexed business of how we feed ourselves. The world’s population has tripled since I was born. There are three times as many mouths to feed now than there were at the end of the Second World War. We rely on satellite images of the earth to grow enough food for ourselves. We use good local weather forecasts to improve our yields. As agricultural land becomes ever more scarce and our growing population does ever more damage to the planet, satellite imagery becomes ever more important. It is used to target the application of pesticides and fertilizers, reducing both costs and pollution; it is used to predict and manage changes in land use to minimize the destruction of the natural world; it is used to map the damage done by natural disasters, like Cyclone Nargis, which tore through Myanmar in May 2008, and it is used to predict the fluctuation of global food prices.

  Global food supplies are managed using data from space. You hardly need me to tell you that this management is imperfect. The system is riddled with terrible inequities. Without data from space, however, things would be unimaginably worse: about one in ten of us would starve.

  How did we get ourselves into this bind, where pictures from space are all that stand between us and mass starvation? The answer is in the numbers: when 2001: A Space Odyssey hit cinema screens in 1968, there were fewer than four billion people on the planet. Now there are nearly seven billion. When my children get to my age, the earth will be expected to feed around ten billion people.

  Images from space have helped us sustain our rising numbers for years. They have helped feed us, and they have helped us save what little of the natural world we can. Most important of all, though, they have given us—for the first time in our history—an accurate measure of just how much damage we are doing to the planet. Were it not for images from space, there would be no global green movement, no international effort (however faltering) to control greenhouse gases, and no international funding for projects to save the natural environment. We would be walking blindly into the greatest ecological crisis we have ever faced. We would have no idea how soon our way of living will be changing: for better, or for worse.

  The truth is this: the earth cannot provide enough food and fresh water for ten billion people, never mind homes, never mind roads, hospitals, and schools. It’s not going to happen. Space industries have sustained human beings in unrealistic numbers for years now. But soon—within our children’s lifetimes—there will have to be a change. Human numbers will be brought under control, one way or another. Either we do something ourselves or we run out of food. Either way, billions of human beings will vanish from the earth’s books.

  What can we do? First, we can minimize the damage we are doing to our world. Here, space industries have already proved their worth and will continue to do so. Information technology brings down the number of unnecessary journeys people have to make—at least that’s the theory. Unfortunately, it pumps twice the amount of carbon into the air that commercial aviation does! The good news is that we know already how to relocate the entire IT industry to orbit. Powered by 24-hour unfiltered sunlight, the world’s communications systems could sustain our civilization from space, and the climate would thank us. (Using today’s rocket technology, even the environmental cost of the move would be vanishingly small compared with the long-term gains.)

  The trouble is, whether you religiously recycle your cornflakes box every week or campaign vigorously to establish solar power stations in orbit, none of your good work is going to do anything to solve the underlying problem, which is that the planet cannot comfortably sustain more than about five billion people. Don’t get me wrong: global warming is a real crisis, and it needs to be addressed now. But it’s not nearly as big a cr
isis as the one behind it: the prospect of ten billion inhabitants who survive (and have survived, for around 1.8 million years) mostly by burning stuff.

  We should begin to address this problem now. The Chinese have already tried by instituting a “one child” policy. It has been, in some ways, a success; but it’s been accused of ruining many lives and has left the state handling all manner of unexpected social problems. Anyway, getting the whole world to agree to such a policy is a pipe dream. Having children is like eating and breathing and arguing and cooking: it’s one of the things we are wired to do. You can’t turn human nature off at the tap.

  What else might we do? Well, if this planet hasn’t the energy to sustain us all, then we will have to draw our power from elsewhere: from solar panels in space, perhaps. If we can move our heavy industries into space, then we might just be able to find the room to grow enough food for ourselves—for a while, at least. Whatever we do, though, the numbers will always be at our back. Our planet is not going to grow any bigger.

  Eventually, some of us may choose to live off-world altogether. Again, the idea is far older, far more serious, and far, far more topical than people generally suppose. Stephen Hawking’s declared reason for joining us on Virgin Galactic is to promote the idea of space colonization.

  Business trips to the moon may yet happen in my lifetime. Most likely they’ll be for mining operations and the extraction of helium-3 for fusion power. NASA wanted to begin construction of its Neil A. Armstrong Lunar Outpost in 2019. That program has been put on hold, but settling the moon is no longer a one-horse race. The odds are good that when the first NASA astronauts since 1972 finally land on the moon, the Chinese will be there to greet them. Meanwhile, the Indian Space Research Organization’s first lunar probe, Chandrayaan-1, was launched on October 22, 2008, stacked with helium-3-related scientific apparatus.