The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  And also from Captain Robert Falcon Scott, a distant relative, navy officer, and explorer who led an expedition that attempted to become the first to reach the South Pole in 1912. The team completed the journey, only to discover that a Norwegian expedition had beaten them there. Scott and the rest of his crew died while trying to make their way back from Antarctica.

  So, later in life, when Lindstrand came to Branson with this crazy idea to fly a balloon across the ocean, it didn’t seem so crazy. A transatlantic balloon trip would be just the sort of thing that would have impressed Bader—and his mother, if she weren’t so worried. If she could dress up as a man and train pilots without any experience, he could do this.

  But it wasn’t just the promise of the thrill that attracted him. A stunt like this would generate all sorts of publicity for Branson and his young airline, a brash upstart of a company he had founded on something of a whim three years earlier. Frustrated with how the industry treated its passengers, herding them into cramped planes, with poor service and frequent delays, he thought there had to be a better way to fly.

  His exasperation with airlines’ cavalier attitude toward their passengers came to a head after a flight from Puerto Rico to the British Virgin Islands was canceled because not enough people were on it.

  Desperate to get there where a “beautiful lady” was waiting for him, he chartered a plane and found a chalkboard. “Virgin Airlines” he wrote on top, and then “$39 one way to BVI.”

  “I went round all the passengers who had been bumped and filled up my first plane,” he later explained.

  He called Boeing and asked to rent a plane, and that was the beginning of Virgin Atlantic. But now his young airline was struggling to compete against British Airways, a behemoth that was trying to squash Branson’s young and plucky upstart. “We needed to come up with fun ways of promoting the airline, getting Virgin on the map,” Branson recalled.

  A daring balloon ride would do it.

  HAVING WATCHED LINDSTRAND jump, Branson was alone in the balloon when it began rising again into the clouds above the water. Not sure what to do, he climbed out on top of the capsule and, with a parachute on his back, thought about jumping. But that seemed rash. He had a giant balloon over him—that would be his parachute. He hadn’t trained a lot on the balloon, but he spent enough time to have a sense of how to bring it down.

  Carefully, he fired the burner, trying to bring the balloon down while peering out at the sea, trying to judge the distance. Just before the capsule hit the water, he inflated his life vest and jumped. Within minutes, a Royal Air Force helicopter was overhead, ready to pull him out of the icy ocean, as the balloon “soared back up through the cloud like a magnificent alien spaceship, vanishing from sight,” he wrote. They rescued Lindstrand, too, who had been in the water for two hours before they found him, shivering and nearly frozen.

  A close call. But a dramatic ending to an extraordinary journey—one that achieved his goals of setting the record, ginning up loads of publicity while also creating plenty of material for his PR machinery to work with.

  As he recalled years later, Virgin Atlantic used the opportunity to take out a full-page newspaper ad that said something along the lines of “Come on, Richard, there are better ways of crossing the Atlantic.”

  BRANSON HAD NAMED his companies “Virgin” because he and his fellow founders were virgins in business. He was a high school dropout who, dyslexic, couldn’t read a spreadsheet. But he was a genius at generating publicity for a long string of companies, starting with the magazine he dropped out of boarding school to run. Then there was the mail-order record company, followed by a record shop, then a recording studio.

  In 1977, when Branson was twenty-six, Virgin Records signed the Sex Pistols, a punk band that had just been fired by its previous label for the musicians’ raucous behavior. Branson put out the band’s album Never Mind the Bollocks and plastered the cover in his record shop window. A young police inspector with the Nottingham Constabulary arrested the manager of one of Branson’s stores for violating the Victorian-era Indecent Advertising Act over the word bollocks, English slang for “testicles.”

  The charges were dropped. And the incident, covered in big, bold headlines by the British tabloids, generated loads of publicity for the young punk band and its chief promoter. But a scandal over a saucy word only went so far. Nothing seemed to get more attention than a wild, record-setting, adventurous ride that was potentially fatal. Especially if the person risking his life was rich.

  In 1985, Branson attempted to set the fastest time across the Atlantic in a boat. He agreed to go on the journey in part because he “relished the chance to promote our new airline. A successful Atlantic crossing would attract publicity in both New York and London, our sole destinations.”

  The first attempt ended in disaster, after the Virgin Atlantic Challenger roared across the choppy ocean for three days, pounding through the waves with such force that it “was like being strapped to the blade of a vast pneumatic drill.” Branson and his team were within just 60 miles of the prize, when they hit a storm and crashed into a wave that broke the boat’s hull, forcing the crew to bail from the sinking ship.

  The next attempt, however, was successful. The Virgin Atlantic Challenger II broke the record, making the journey in 3 days, 8 hours, and 31 minutes, bringing back the honor to Great Britain, after the United States had held the record for years. To pull off the stunt, Branson had missed the birth of his son, Sam. But he could justify it over the headlines he had created.

  To celebrate, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher joined Branson on the ship, a cross between a cigarette boat and a yacht, and they floated down the Thames, waving to the crowds, gaining the sort of attention no ad or marketing campaign could ever achieve.

  He’d carry on that way for years—dressing up as a bride to sell his new bridal shops, getting stranded in the Algerian desert during an attempt to circle the globe in a balloon, crashing in the Canadian Arctic on a successful attempt to cross the Pacific in a balloon that was supposed to land in southern California.

  At a celebration of Virgin Atlantic’s twenty-first birthday, he slung a scantily clad Pamela Anderson awkwardly over his shoulder so that her breasts fell out of her revealing red dress in what may or may not have been an intentional flashing before the cameras. To launch Virgin Cola, he drove a tank through a wall of Coca-Cola cans in New York’s Times Square. And when he finally signed the Rolling Stones to Virgin Records, completing a lifelong dream, he said the most memorable part “was the hangover I had the day after.”

  CBS’s 60 Minutes dubbed him “the billionaire stuntman.” The New York Times called him “a one-man publicity circus.” It was all in the service of his ever-growing empire of companies that would eventually include a wild, scattershot portfolio—Virgin Mobile, Virgin Money, Virgin Wines, Virgin Trains, Virgin Casino, Virgin Books, Virgin Racing, Virgin Sport, Virgin Media, Virgin Hotels, Virgin Holiday Cruises, Virgin America, Virgin Australia—which, taken together, personified corporate attention deficit disorder as much as ambition.

  There was, however, a method to this madness. A common thread that ran through all these seemingly disparate ventures: the embodiment of cool and sexy, and the very Branson “screw-it-let’s-do-it” freedom that tiptoed along the fine line separating recklessness from brilliance. So, there would be no Virgin Tax Prep, no Virgin Dentistry, no Virgin Bow Ties. Only that which held quixotic promises of the good life that lay somewhere in between the never-grow-old teenager’s innocent idealism and the Sex Pistols’ convulsing, rocket-thrust riffs.

  But none of it—not the speedboats, not the ballooning, not the Rolling Stones (well, maybe, the Rolling Stones)—could compete with the venture he was now pursuing, a company with ambitions that could finally meet Branson’s stratospheric hype.

  A space company, called Virgin Galactic.

  WITHOUT A ROCKET or a spacecraft or any real knowledge of space travel, Branson registered the name “Virgin Ga
lactic Airways,” hopeful that he’d one day be able to start a space company.

  He spent years talking to people in the space community, picking the brains of engineers “to see whether I could find anyone who would be competent to build spaceships,” he later recalled.

  But it just didn’t seem possible. Space, it turned out, was exceedingly difficult—far more so than ballooning, or speedboats or airplanes. Years before, he’d had an opportunity to go to space. Mikhail Gorbachev, then the leader of the Soviet Union, had called to offer Branson what seemed just the sort of opportunity he had made his hallmark—this time, to become the first civilian in space.

  However, accepting the invitation would cost Branson something like $50 million and require him to spend two years training in Russia. “I was building Virgin and just wasn’t sure I could give up that amount of time,” he said. “I was also just a bit worried that it would be perceived wrongly to spend that sort of money going to space.”

  So, for once, he did not say, “Screw it, let’s do it.” Instead, he said no—something that would sit as a “half regret” with him for years. “It would have been absolutely magnificent.”

  Meanwhile, the search for a rocket ship—or someone who could build one—was becoming frustratingly fruitless. By the early 2000s, “I had almost given up at that stage, moving on to other things.”

  Such as the Virgin GlobalFlyer. It was a sleek, single-seat airplane designed for yet another of Branson’s adventures: to break the speed record for flying around the world. It was being built in the Mojave Desert by Rutan’s Scaled Composites. When one of Branson’s deputies went to check on it, he stumbled by accident onto something altogether different, something he knew his boss would want to know about immediately.

  “You won’t believe it, but I think we’ve got something even more exciting than the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer here,” he told Branson.

  It was SpaceShipOne.

  Knowing Branson would want to seize the opportunity, one of his executives rushed to register the name “Virgin Galactic”—only to find out that Branson had already done it years before.

  Within days, Branson was in the Mojave Desert, looking at SpaceShipOne. This was it. This was the spacecraft that he’d been searching for for years. He had to be a part of it.

  That day, he met with Paul Allen and Rutan at Rutan’s house. The airplane inventor showed Branson his collection of paper napkins and scraps of paper on which he scribbled the ideas that popped into his head. Here were his concepts for spaceships and here was the idea for the “feather,” the system that would detach the wings of the spaceplane from the body of the aircraft and fold upward, creating drag.

  Rutan and Allen were thinking far ahead, indulging Branson’s passion for space.

  “We sat down and talked about hotels on the moon and day trips to the moon and all sorts of exciting things,” Branson said. “And at the end of it we agreed that Virgin would help sponsor SpaceShipOne. And Paul and I agreed that if it was successful, we’d meet up and talk about trying to carry the program forward afterward.”

  SPACESHIPONE AND THE Ansari X Prize had shown that a commercial venture could put a person in space. The elusive dream had been realized, with Paul Allen as its benefactor. But Allen had never been comfortable with the enormous risks, and the fact that he was funding a venture in which people had such a good chance of dying was overwhelming. He had gotten through three flights that had made history. But, perhaps more important, no one had been hurt.

  Branson visited Allen at his home in the Holland Park section of London. “I said, ‘Look, I think there are hundreds of thousands of people who would love to go to space, and it would be a terrible waste if this was the end of it. We’re going to develop a spaceship company, and obviously it would help if we could have the basic technology that’s been developed to date.’ And we shook hands on that. And bizarrely, I was the only person who went to see him about it.”

  After signing the licensing deal, Allen gladly turned over the keys to Branson, who was eager to take SpaceShipOne’s simple design and blow it open to build an even bigger spaceplane. Whereas SpaceShipOne carried just a single person (though it carried the weight of three to meet the X Prize’s requirements), Branson’s SpaceShipTwo would carry two pilots and six passengers. A modest iterative step up this was not. Instead, SpaceShipTwo would be a bold advancement, especially given how SpaceShipOne had bucked and rattled its way on its white-knuckled rides into space. But Branson didn’t do incremental, or modest.

  Despite the daunting task ahead, Branson wasted no time in injecting the full force of Virgin’s vaunted PR machine into promoting the allure of the final frontier—and how he was going to make it available to the masses. Virgin Galactic would become the “world’s first commercial spaceline,” he crowed, one that would transform everyday paying tourists into full-fledged astronauts. He vowed that Virgin’s maiden flight would happen as early as 2007, and that it would fly three thousand people in the first five years.

  He even promoted Virgin Galactic during a Super Bowl commercial for Volvo in February 2005, just months after obtaining the rights to SpaceShipOne. The ad featured the liftoff of a rocket with a bumper sticker that said, “My other vehicle is a Volvo XC90 V8.”

  “Introducing the most powerful Volvo ever,” the narrator said. “The Volvo XC90 V8.”

  As the narrator asked, “How powerful is it?” the camera cut to the astronaut inside the rocket, who lifted his visor to reveal that it was Branson.

  “Powerful enough to get you into space,” he said.

  Branson treated space like a religion and he was its evangelist, preaching the virtues of space travel and the “life-changing” effects a trip into the stars could have, even if they lasted just a short while. Even if, at the time, they seemed little more than illusory. He was years away from developing a spacecraft capable of taking anyone to space, but that didn’t stop the hype.

  “We hope to create thousands of astronauts over the next few years and bring alive their dream of seeing the majestic beauty of our planet from above, the stars in all their glory and the amazing sensations of weightlessness and space flight,” he said. “The development will also allow every country in the world to have their own astronauts rather than the privileged few.”

  Branson wasn’t the first to try to sell the allure of space. During the 1960s, Pan Am started promoting trips to the moon as a way to cash in on the surging interest the Apollo program generated. So, it created a waiting list of passengers who wanted to go to the moon.

  “We like to think of ourselves as pioneers,” a Pan Am spokesman told the New York Times in 1969. “We were first across the Pacific and had many firsts across the Atlantic as well. We’re going to be the first to fly the Boeing 747. So we would hope some day that we would be pioneering moon travel. That’s why we keep the list.”

  Whether or not it was a PR stunt, Pan Am’s customers bought it, signing up for their trips to the moon in droves. In return, the future astronauts received a letter addressed “Dear Moon First Flighter,” signed by James Montgomery, Pan Am’s vice president of sales.

  “Thank you for your confidence that Pan Am will pioneer commercial Space travel, as it so often has here on Earth. We have every intention of living up to this confidence,” the letter began.

  It acknowledged that the “starting date of service is not yet known.… Fares are not fully resolved, and may be out of this world.” The letter came with a card declaring the holder a “certified member” of Pan Am’s “First Moon Flights Club,” with a number denoted where the holder stood on the waiting list.

  The New York Times reported that by early 1969, some two hundred had signed up. The list grew quickly, and agents at the airline grew used to handling the moon reservations with a matter-of-fact “For how many passengers, please?” On July 19, 1969, the day before the first moon landing, Pan Am’s chief executive, Najeeb Halaby, told WCBS in New York that the airline was focused on “the concept o
f boosters that can be reused, of a space station which is like an airport in space, and frequent trips between the orbiting space station and various points on the moon.”

  By the time Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface, the reservation list had grown to twenty-five thousand names. By 1971, when it stopped taking the reservations, more than ninety thousand people had signed up, including Ronald Reagan and Walter Cronkite.

  Pan Am folded in 1992, but believed up to the end that tourist trips to the moon were not just possible but an inevitability. “Commercial flights to the moon are going to happen,” a company spokesman told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. “They might not happen next year, they might not happen in five years—but they will happen.”

  Now, years later, Branson was shooting for the edge of space, not the moon. But he approached the endeavor with the same gale-force enthusiasm, promising that flights to space were just around the corner.

  “By the end of the decade, Virgin Galactic—the most exciting development in the story of modern space history—is planning to make it possible for almost anyone to visit the final frontier at an affordable price,” the company said on an early version of its website.

  Just after the final X Prize flight, and long before Virgin Galactic had anything close to resembling a new spacecraft, it invited potential customers to sign up on its website. By early 2006, Branson showed off a mockup spacecraft with a flat-screen television that gave a sense of what the journey into the heavens would be like. The seats were ergonomic, the windows numerous, and the first flights safe—and sublime.

  The website laid out how the experience would unfold, in purple, at times creatively punctuated, prose. Seemingly describing an out-of-this-world, orgasmic acid trip, the narrative explained how the spacecraft would be tethered to the mothership, which would climb to 50,000 feet.