Losing My Virginity

by Richard Branson

  Many of us were moved by what we saw and experienced during this first civilian flight into Iraq since 1990. Not least Jackie who, joined by three Iraqi exiles who are now doctors in Britain, went downtown to visit some of the patients in Basra General Hospital. It was there she saw first hand not only the pain and suffering inflicted on civilians during war, but also the fact that there is always hope and beauty no matter how horrific the situation. In the hospital she met a young woman of twenty who had been severely wounded in the legs and stomach by shrapnel. Despite her agony, she could not drag her eyes away from her beautiful little baby girl, who had been born by emergency caesarean section two days before. Seeing Jackie’s tears of sympathy the woman said: ‘Please don’t cry for me, God has given me the greatest gift of all and in her eyes is only innocence and love.’ They were some of the most poignant words relayed to me that day.

  The Pentagon suggested that the cost of the conflict in Iraq would be approximately $75 billion per year over ten years. In accepting the Niwano Peace Prize on 8 May 2003, Dr Priscilla Elworthy, of the Oxford Research Group, said, ‘We must compare this $75 billion to the costs of building international security in other ways.

  ‘(a) In the year 2000 world leaders estimated that it would require $25 billion to $35 billion annually to raise levels of health and welfare in Africa to Western standards.

  ‘(b) Unesco estimate that all the world’s children could be educated if we were to spend $7 billion dollars per year for ten years.

  ‘(c) Clear water and sanitation could be provided for everyone in the world for $9 billion annually.

  ‘(d) HIV and Aids now claim 5,500 lives a day around the world – more than the Black Death – and twelve million children in Africa have been orphaned by the disease. Kofi Annan has called for $10 billion annually to address the Aids epidemic.

  ‘So all these goals could be reached, all this suffering prevented worldwide for less than the United States spends on military action in Iraq.’

  However, she ended on a positive note by quoting Dr Müller, the Chancellor of the University of Peace in Costa Rica, and the Dalai Lama.

  ‘Dr Müller, in a speech earlier this year, said, “I’m so honoured to be alive at such a miraculous time in history. I’m so moved by what’s going on in our world today. Never before in the history of the world has there been a global, visible, public, viable, open dialogue and conversation about the very legitimacy of war. What will be the consequences? The costs? What might be the peaceful alternatives? What kind of negotiations are we not thinking of? What are the real intentions of declaring war?”

  ‘Many millions of people in the world seem to have found a new voice. Maybe some good may emerge from the decision to invade Iraq after all.

  ‘And finally the beautiful quotation purportedly from the Dalai Lama: “If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another. If you wish to know that you are safe, cause others to know that they are safe. If you wish to better understand seemingly incomprehensible things, help another to better understand. If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another.

  ‘“Those others are watching for you now. They are looking to you for guidance, for help, for courage, for strength, for understanding and for assurance at this hour. Most of all – they are looking to you for love.”’

  Back in London in the spring of 2004, it was business as usual in the Virgin empire. Gordon McCallum, previously Group Strategy Director for the Virgin Group, was busy preparing Virgin Mobile for its flotation on the London Stock Market with an expected valuation of £1 billion. It really had been a remarkable story. In only four years we had created the world’s first virtual mobile-phone network and established a base of 4 million customers who were the most satisfied in the industry. Even more exciting, in some ways, was the huge success of the US mobile venture, which we had started in the dark days of post-11 September America. Even by 2004, it was clear that Virgin Mobile USA could eventually be more valuable than the UK operation. It had become the fastest-growing company in the history of corporate America to reach a billion dollars and had done so in under three years. Hot on the heels of the US, other colleagues, Robert Samuelson and Max Kelly, were beavering away in Canada recruiting the team for yet another mobile venture to launch there in 2005 in partnership with Bell Canada. By mid-2004, it was becoming obvious that the model really worked and we could provide a better deal for consumers, through leveraging our brand off other networks’ excess capacity. As the year drew on, more and more opportunities began to pop up in places as diverse as Africa and China.

  In July of that year Virgin Mobile UK floated on the stockmarket. In the five years since the company had started, it had become a major force in the UK mobile industry, gathering over 4 million customers and becoming one of the most profitable companies in the industry based on its simple and cheap ‘virtual network’ model. As usual our timing was impeccable! The stockmarket was the worst it had been since 11 September and flotations were getting pulled on a daily basis on both sides of the Atlantic. To add insult to injury, the only other company floating on the stockmarket in Britain at the time was the manufacturer of Branston’s pickle – so it won’t take much for you to imagine the headlines that accompanied our dilemma on whether or not to float Virgin Mobile. I was on holiday on Necker when we took the final decision to go ahead at a reduced price of £2 per share. The psychology was very important to us in that the Virgin Group had once been quoted on the stockmarket in Britain and we had always said that, if we came back, it would be with a single company focused on a particular business. I’m glad to say that, in the winter of 2004, the Virgin Mobile shares went from strength to strength. This has resulted in a huge amount of interest in our US mobile business and proposals to float it, which we did in late 2007, with a share price of $15. Two thousand and five was also the year that we began to take the mobile concept around the world on the back of the success of the UK, Australia and the USA. The first big new mobile launch was in Canada in the spring with South Africa to follow in the winter and deals being done for launches in China, India and other parts of Africa.

  Not only had the successful flotation of Virgin Mobile allowed us to consider indulging in riskier projects such as space travel, but it also gave us the chance to try out one or two fun sponsorships of the type that Virgin had not been able to do since 11 September. Steve Fossett’s Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer was only one of these. In early 2005 we agreed to back a unique archaeological project to survey ancient Alexandria using the latest geophysical equipment – a georadar. Many important historical buildings, such as the tomb of Alexander the Great, the Great Library and Ptolemaic Royal Palace, have lain hidden and undiscovered somewhere under the city of Alexandria since late Roman times when an earthquake destroyed the whole area. It felt like old times for me as Martyn Gregory, with whom I had become a friend since he had written his book about BA’s dirty tricks and another, Diana, The Last Days, on the death of my friend Princess Diana, presented the idea. He had credible research behind his belief that a group of young archaeologists could unmask the secrets that lie below the modern city using ground-penetrating radar. It would take until 2006 to find out whether he was right and if we would be part of the greatest archaeological discovery of all time or yet another forgotten sponsor of an ill-fated expedition to find one of the wonders of the ancient world.

  Despite 11 September, we did not ignore the airline industry where it was clear there were still opportunities to create really exciting businesses. By the summer of 2004, Fred Reid, who used to run Delta Airlines, was recruited to lead one of Virgin’s boldest moves in its 35-year history – an all-out assault on the bankrupt US domestic air-travel market. Because of the historic protectionism of the US domestic market I would have to play a relatively minor role in the creation of Virgin America as an airline, with the majority of the funding and the management coming from US institutions and companies. It was, therefore, bizar
re – but deeply satisfying – to wake up one morning in May 2004 to read that my new airline was going to be called Virgin America. For me, Virgin had come of age. We had the confidence to invest in the world’s toughest aviation market and be prepared to not have full control of the company’s destiny. The very rules that had made the US such a barrier to entry to us in the past and which BA had tried to use to seal a monopoly, no longer held any fear for us. Over the years we had witnessed some of the most anti-consumer and monopolistic practices by the big US carriers. It finally appeared that the tables were turning. But for some the desire to keep the barriers up to new players within this underserved market is still great. In July 2004 I received a letter from a friend who had attended the ACTC Aviation Conference in Washington. In attendance at this event were the chief executive officers of the leading five American carriers. During the meeting one of these gentlemen was heard to remark: ‘All we need now is Branson and the cookies will get very burnt.’ This sounds vaguely familiar. If not flattering!

  However, it was not the new airline but another unique aviation event that took me back to America during mid summer that year. On a cold morning on 22 June 2004, I was fortunate enough to witness one of the most amazing sights I have ever seen as the world’s first privately funded spaceship streaked into the skies above the little town of Mojave in the Californian desert. SpaceShipOne was the truly remarkable brainchild of Burt Rutan, a friend I had known for many years. Burt is one of the world’s true geniuses and his designs for numerous aircraft had been groundbreaking for decades. He was already working with Steve Fossett and me on the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, a unique and beautiful aircraft that we were planning for Steve (or myself, if he got ill) to attempt the world’s first non-stop solo flight. The aircraft looked amazing, but not as amazing as the little spaceship I had seen hidden in the hangar earlier that year and was now streaking into space at 3,000 miles an hour above our heads in the desert.

  Another friend, Paul Allen, who is one of the founders of Microsoft, had funded Burt’s vision of a cheap reusable spaceship for some years. Like Burt, Paul is a visionary. He was visibly excited as he watched his sci-fi dream unfold and become tomorrow’s reality. Mike Melville, an incredibly brave pilot, took the little spacecraft to 328,000 feet (100km) above the Earth. I watched with awe and realised that our own vision of cheap space tourism might finally be becoming a real possibility. At dinner with Burt and Paul the night before, we had discussed the future of private space flight through a partnership with each other and I left the evening feeling uplifted. I had always felt that the government monopoly on space was a danger to mankind rather than the benefit often touted by cynical politicians and self-serving missile manufacturers. Monopolies don’t work in any industry whether public or private. Here was a chance for Virgin to take on the final frontier. I’m sure you won’t be surprised that we had registered both the trademark rights and a company for space travel ten years earlier – to be called Virgin Galactic Airways. The Virgin Group – ‘To Infinity and Beyond’! ‘You must be joking,’ people said to me. ‘OK,’ I responded, ‘Virgin Intergalactic Airways!’

  All in all, 2004 turned out to be a hugely important year for Virgin on every front. The Virgin Galactic joke became a very serious reality in September of that year. After months of intense negotiations Paul Allen agreed to sell the rights to the technology, which had made SpaceShipOne, to Virgin Galactic, which was officially born as a company on 15 September 2004. Within two weeks SpaceShipOne, carrying the Virgin banner, had completed two flights into space – the first-ever repeated private space flights – winning Burt and Paul the X-Prize, a US$10 million aviation incentive prize designed to jumpstart the space tourism industry. The media went wild and Burt rightfully took his place as an all-American hero. It was one of the proudest moments of my life to stand with Paul and Burt on a cool, still desert morning in Mojave to watch the second flight successfully completed. There was something about that day that just made you realise that we were watching history unfold and it reminded me of one of my favourite films of all time: The Right Stuff.

  It wasn’t easy to persuade my level-headed colleagues at the Virgin Group of the sense in investing over $100m in building a spaceship. In fact, amusingly, I intercepted an email between some of these ‘level-headed’ colleagues by mistake, which said that I should be called ‘Dr Yes’ because I said ‘yes’ to everything. By now, Stephen Murphy, who had worked for Virgin in the early 1990s and had since returned to work with us again, had become the nearest thing that we had to a real chief executive and, for the past three years, he had led a committee who scrutinised all of our investment decisions. When Will Whitehorn had to present them with the notion that I wanted to launch commercial space flights by 2008, they were just a little bit sceptical! Unless you have met Burt Rutan and understand his achievements, it would be hard for anyone to believe that a small group of buildings in the Mojave desert could possibly manufacture and safely fly a cheap private spacecraft. But, as the deal to launch Virgin Galactic unfolded, so did the credibility of the project, and, by the beginning of 2005, even my hardheaded bean counters began to accept that the project was viable. As readers of this book will know, I’ve often been accused of talking ahead of myself, but I do believe that in the near future we will be taking the world’s first private astronauts regularly into space both safely and for $200,000 or less each.

  The unique features of Burt’s spaceships that give me so much confidence are the safety of both his rocket motor and his feathering device for re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. In both cases his genius has been to take very old ideas and apply modern technology to them. Let’s start with his rocket motor. It is unique in that it burns laughing gas and rubber; by themselves both inert, put them together and you’ve got a perfectly credible rocket motor, which is also much safer than the highly combustible liquid-fuelled rockets of NASA. One cynic did point out that, if anything ever happened up in space, at least we’d die laughing.

  The other feature turns the spaceship from a streamlined supersonic craft into the equivalent of a sycamore leaf or shuttlecock whilst in space. This allows the craft to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere much more slowly than a space shuttle would, which removes the risk of overheating.

  The final feature of Burt’s design is his use of plastic and what are called composite materials; neither the mother ship that launches his spaceship nor the spaceship itself are built of metal, but instead use new heat-resistant materials that are lighter and safer than aluminium or steel. The net result is a spaceship launch mechanism that is safe, cheap and environmentally friendly. To have the same impact on the environment as one space-shuttle launch would require many tens of thousands of launches by our spaceship. This means that the vision of millions of people – that they may one day be able to visit the stars – can finally be realised. However, this won’t be true of Joan Branson, who has not volunteered for the first flight, despite the fact that both my mum and dad and Holly and Sam all want to go. I suppose I should hardly be surprised as Joan still crushes my hand every time we fly anywhere together. My dad will be in his nineties when he flies. When asked whether he was worried about going into space, he responded by saying that, given his age, that was the least of his worries.

  If my confidence in Burt Rutan’s unique status as the Einstein of aerodynamics needed any reinforcing as we geared up to build the world’s first truly commercial spaceship, it happened at the end of February 2005. When Steve Fossett had approached me in 2002 to be his back-up pilot in case of illness I readily agreed, and was equally pleased to fund and manage the building and flying of the world’s first high-altitude global circumnavigation aircraft. We could not have dreamed that three years later the project would also have produced one of the most extraordinarily beautiful aircraft ever built, the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer. It was Steve’s ambition to fly it solo around the world in less than eighty hours, using a combination of one of the most efficient aircraf
t designs ever built and Burt Rutan’s legendary ability to build large composite aircraft not containing any metal.

  It was a freezing evening on Monday 28 February when Steve Fossett took off from Salina, Kansas, to attempt his heroic flight. The aircraft looked magnificent as it trundled down the runway with 18,000lbs of fuel on board out of a total weight of little over 21,000lbs. Thousands watched the take-off and all of our hearts were in our mouths for ten seconds when, having lifted off, Steve drifted back down towards the runway, but, before the fatal moment that we all saw in our mind’s eye, he swooped away like a beautiful swallow into the night skies of the Midwest.

  I followed him up for the first few hours in the chase plane, and was due to be dropped in Toronto by Will and the team in order that I could launch Virgin Mobile the next day in Canada. As we headed into a freezing blizzard, it was clear that all was not well with the plane: in the climb out from Kansas, Steve had definitely lost some fuel and there seemed to be a problem with his GPS system as he crossed the Canadian border. I was unceremoniously dumped on the tarmac by the chase plane team and left to head into Toronto not knowing if Steve was going to make it. But, like most things at Scaled Composites (Burt’s company in the Mojave desert), every contingency had been thought of, and over the next twenty-four hours John Karkow, Burt’s brilliant aircraft designer, crunched the numbers and came to the conclusion that if the jetstream winds remained strong around the Earth then Steve could still make it. For sixty-seven hours Steve battled with the elements and, at one point, flew as high as 49,000 feet above the Earth in order to try and catch the best fuel efficiency and winds.

  Having left Kansas in freezing, wintery conditions on the Monday night, he arrived back at the same airport, having not slept or landed anywhere on the planet’s surface, to the beautiful sunshine of a spring day. It was one of the happiest moments I’ve ever had and, even though I hadn’t participated in the attempt directly, I felt not only proud of Steve, but also a strange comradeship with his achievement – the type you can only feel if you’ve been there once before with him.