Finding My Virginity: The New Autobiography

by Richard Branson

  As we sat down in the pyramid, I asked Burt for more details about his vehicle, which he called SpaceShipOne.

  “It’s simple, really,” he said. I was expecting some sort of detailed blueprint, but instead Burt pulled out a napkin. A man after my own heart! It turned out that Burt had quite an extensive collection of napkins he’d sketched ideas down on. The drawing for SpaceShipOne was on napkin number 316, while a sketch of the mothership WhiteKnightOne was on napkin 318. I resisted the overwhelming urge to ask what was on napkin number 317—it may have been another spaceship design, or perhaps just a ketchup stain.

  Burt explained that his aim for SpaceShipOne was to win the Ansari XPRIZE. Launched in May 1996, this was the largest prize offered in history, with $10 million going to whoever could meet its near-impossible criteria. The winner would be the first private team to build and launch a spacecraft capable of carrying a person into space. Oh, and they had to do it twice within two weeks. No pressure! In total, there were twenty-six teams from seven different nations competing for the prize—not just the money, but also the prestige of being the first, the fastest, the highest and the best.

  Burt explained the unique design of his system. He wasn’t particularly inspired by the NASA Mercury and Apollo launches I had seen on the television all those years ago. There was no massive rocket to shoot the spaceship upward, and no dramatic ten-to-one countdown before boosters would be ignited. Instead, Burt looked back further to the X Series rocket planes that had smashed the sound barrier for the US Air Force, just down the road at Edwards Air Base. Airplanes like the X-15 had been hitched to B-52 bombers and released from great heights, saving fuel and allowing them to zoom arrow-like to the edge of space.

  Burt and his napkin designs had their own spin on the concept. WhiteKnightOne would act as an ultra-light mothership, being able to hold the heavy load of SpaceShipOne tethered underneath it. It would carry the spaceship up to a great height and then release her from the heavens. Now came the truly inspired part. The biggest problem with space travel had never been getting into space, but getting back down to Earth safely. Burt believed he had devised a new system for SpaceShipOne that could solve this issue. After being dropped from WhiteKnightOne, the spaceship would rocket upward until it reached its peak height in space. Once it was ready to return, its unique feathering system would come into play. SpaceShipOne’s wings would be unlocked and be able to adjust position to fold upward. This would effectively turn the ship into a giant shuttlecock as it began re-entry into the atmosphere. Rather than plummeting at breakneck speed, it would glide down gently and smoothly before landing back on the runway it had left a few hours earlier, soft as a feather.

  It sounded brilliant, but I knew this would be extraordinarily expensive to create. This is where Paul Allen, the visionary Microsoft co-founder, came in. He, too, loved space travel; he knew the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts by heart and wanted to become one himself. He also craved taking on insurmountable challenges, and was similarly convinced about Burt’s genius. Burt told me that he originally had several meetings with Paul. He had decided not to ask him for an investment until he believed in the project so much that if he had the cash he would have put it in himself. Finally, Burt turned to Paul and spoke with iron-fisted conviction.

  “I know I can do this and I want to do this now.”

  Paul leaned over, shook Burt’s hand and said: “We’re going to do it then. Now.”

  Paul agreed to put in around $25 million, giving the program enough financial clout to compete with rival projects from the US, UK, Russia, Argentina, Romania and Canada. Paul never got on Burt’s back about spending too much money, even as timelines overran and costs increased exponentially. Both Burt and Paul were convinced they had a good shot at winning the XPRIZE and that was good enough for me. We quickly agreed for Virgin to sponsor the Mojave Aerospace Ventures team, and for the spaceship to have the Virgin logo on its tail. The advantage I had was that neither Paul nor Burt had a consumer company to promote, so they were happy for us to get involved.

  Plus I don’t think I would have taken no for an answer!

  —

  On 21 June 2004, I was back in the Mojave Desert, along with an assorted crowd of hundreds of space enthusiasts, locals, scientists, families and students. Since Virgin had come on board as a sponsor, SpaceShipOne’s development had continued to progress. On 17 December the previous year, the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first powered flight, the craft had made its first rocket-powered flight. Piloted by Brian Binnie, it became the first privately built craft to go supersonic. Now, after a further six months of technical refinements, the vehicle was ready to make its first attempt at flying into space. Or as Burt told Time magazine before the flight: “I’ve been to two goat ropings and a county fair, and I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  Mike Melvill, an affable sixty-four-year-old test pilot from Scaled Composites, was at the controls. Mike wore very distinctive glasses that helped him to exude calm: I could have done with some of those glasses myself. As per Burt’s original plan, SpaceShipOne was taken up by WhiteKnightOne, being flown by Brian Binnie. He took Mike to the pre-arranged height and the gathered crowd held its breath for the countdown.

  “Release, release, release!” As the command rang out, we watched as the spaceship first dropped from beneath the mothership, then shot up at an acute angle. So far, so good. But then, as the g-forces grew, the spaceship rolled 90 degrees to the left, which was absolutely not part of the plan. In Mike’s desperate struggle to correct the problem, the ship then rolled 90 degrees right. There was clearly an issue with the main control system, and SpaceShipOne wasn’t able to reach as steep an incline as intended. Back down in the desert, we feared the worst. It was going to be touch-and-go whether Mike would be able to land the spaceship safely again, let alone reach space. Then, just as all seemed lost, the backup controls kicked into gear and he guided the ship up, up, up. It reached its peak height 400 meters above the sixty-two-mile line, the XPRIZE milestone. To applause and cheers of relief, the spacecraft had made it into space—by no more than the length of an athletics track.

  There was still a lot of work to be done. But while there were many issues that needed resolving before we attempted the two XPRIZE flights in quick succession, the overall signs were good. With the big days a matter of weeks away, I began looking to the future. Paul Allen and I both lived in Holland Park, London, at the time, so I popped round to his house for a cup of tea. Paul’s house was quiet and sparse, very different from the bustling atmosphere in my home, where people were always coming and going and the kids were running around. In a similar way, Paul and I have very different business philosophies: while I often talk ahead of myself and overshare, Paul keeps his cards closer to his chest. I remember coming out of a meeting with him and his staff crowding around me. “What did he say to you?” they wanted to know.

  I asked Paul what he planned to do with the spaceship if it was successful. To my horror, he said he wanted to put it in the Smithsonian once it had accomplished his dream, securing its place in aviation’s historic canon.

  “You can’t do that,” I said. “What you are doing is incredible, but you’re missing out on the bigger opportunity here. The government isn’t going to start sending people to space again—it’s up to us. If you put SpaceShipOne in a museum, we’re losing the chance of a lifetime—of many lifetimes.”

  “What are you suggesting, then?” Paul asked.

  “I’m talking about developing Virgin Galactic as a consumer brand,” I explained. “Virgin runs businesses for people. We go into a market where the public is not being served well, and drastically improve it. What better or bigger market than space?”

  I knew that some of the technology Burt’s team had developed could be really useful for Virgin going forward. I told Paul we would be happy to pay a royalty on using the technology that had been developed. Paul
liked the idea and understood the logic, though he still wanted to put SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnightOne in the Smithsonian. I understood, anxious to close the licensing agreement. I couldn’t believe we were the only company interested—there should have been a line out of the door! Paul was good enough to shake hands on a deal right there in his kitchen.

  —

  On 29 September 2004, I stood out on the tarmac in Mojave looking at SpaceShipOne glowing white and red in the blazing sun. I couldn’t stand still. The big test—our shot at winning the XPRIZE—had arrived. A couple of days earlier, I had arrived to officially announce our new business: Virgin Galactic. I said that if SpaceShipOne won the XPRIZE, we would engage Scaled Composites to develop a much larger new mothership and spaceship—WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo—with the aim of launching passengers into space. I would be the first passenger. Reservations would open very soon, I announced, with customers putting down a full $200,000 deposit in advance, though this would be fully refundable until we had proven the technology. My announcement caused quite a stir and there was huge interest in what we were attempting. Now all we needed was for the team to win the XPRIZE.

  Mike Melvill took the first of the two flights stipulated by the competition rules. As we watched SpaceShipOne drop from the mothership and blast off into the stratosphere, I wondered whether we were more scared watching back on Earth than Mike was striving for space. He had plenty of reasons to be terrified; the ride was far from smooth. At 170,000 feet the spaceship went into a series of vertical rolls, spinning a record twenty-nine times up to 300,000 feet. It was out of control, speeding faster than a bullet out of the Earth’s atmosphere. How Mike didn’t pass out I’ll never know. But the system worked, the spaceship went up into space at 102.9 kilometers and Mike got back to Earth in one piece.

  When he climbed out of the cockpit to great relief and applause, I asked him how it felt to see the wonder of space.

  “It felt like a religious experience,” he told me, seeing the curvature of the Earth alone in a tiny ship. He had felt the beginnings of what is known as the overview effect, a shift in awareness whereby astronauts realize just how fragile and precious life back on Earth really is. Even Mike’s calm exterior cracked a little at feeling that.

  Five days later, it was time for the second flight. After so much spinning on the first test, there were yet more issues to solve in precious little time. Yet the Scaled team remained confident: the spinning, though scary, also showed the strength of the spaceship and how much pressure it could withstand. When it came time for Scaled to decide who would be the pilot this time around, Brian Binnie got the nod.

  That morning, I stood in the Control Room feeling nervous as Brian climbed into SpaceShipOne. As calm as Brian had looked, many of us in the control room were the exact opposite. The stakes felt high: this was an all-or-nothing moment for us. If the XPRIZE was not won, it would be unlikely that Virgin Galactic could get started. As I hoped and wished that Brian would get SpaceShipOne high enough to win the prize, another even more serious concern took over. What if he didn’t make it back at all? But it was too late to think that: for this flight, we were beyond the point of no return.

  The spaceship looked stunningly beautiful as it was released to fly solo without a hitch. WhiteKnightTwo bounced up and its pilot Mike Melvill flew the mothership out of the way. After six seconds of free fall, Brian ignited the rocket motor at around 46,000 feet. With unbelievable power, the spaceship reached full thrust within a fraction of a second. It began its rocket-powered ascent as smoothly as one can expect from a test vehicle zooming at supersonic speeds. Within a dozen seconds the sound barrier was passed. After one minute the ship was approaching 5,000 kilometers per hour and the sky began to change color. From the milky blues of the California sky, the view turned darker, moving through navy past gray into pitch black.

  Suddenly, we lost radio contact. Burt still looked relaxed, but I saw his expression darken as the silent seconds ticked on. After what seemed like an eternity, the radio crackled into life and Brian’s voice reverberated around the room—up in the outer atmosphere, everything was fine. The relief was palpable. I exchanged sideways glances with Alex and Will, and Paul and I breathed out almighty sighs in unison. After about eighty seconds the engine shut off, and deep silence made the darkness feel blacker still. Out of Brian’s window, the curvature of the Earth shone clear and bright. Gravity disappeared from the cockpit, and he knew he was in space. Before SpaceShipOne deployed its feathering system, it reached its top-level altitude of a record 112.2 kilometers above the Earth, smashing the required target. The XPRIZE had been won.

  When SpaceShipOne landed in triumph, there was a lot of hugging with the family, a few tears and smiles all round. I had the great honor of shaking the pilots’ hands and congratulating them on a job well done. Somebody told me it was the forty-seventh anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. We were truly standing on the shoulders of giants.

  I clambered up on top of a pickup truck with the pilots, Burt, Paul and the team. As we waved to the crowd, high-fived and embraced, a chilling rule in the XPRIZE regulations came to mind. It stated that the pilots had to stay alive for at least twenty-four hours after their flight in order for the result to stand. I noticed that the roof of the pickup was very slippery indeed, especially as we began jolting around, spraying champagne. As we stood atop this greasy moving vehicle, I couldn’t help but glance at Brian, hoping he wouldn’t fall off and kill himself. I noticed Burt was making the same eyes at Paul and me. Later, he told me: “I was more afraid that one of the billionaires would fall off than the pilot who had to stay alive for us to win $10 million!”

  We agreed to contract Scaled Composites to begin work on our new space program; but we would also build our own team from scratch to ultimately take over Scaled’s work. Then we had to think about taking reservations, navigate our way through all manner of rules and regulations, and work out how all this fitted in with everything else happening in the Virgin world. We didn’t know how it would all work, but I was convinced we would be creating hundreds of jobs, and inspiring millions of dreams. I realized that with the barriers broken, and two commercial astronauts receiving their wings, I was one (small) step closer myself. Suddenly it was very likely that our family, our friends and thousands of others would have the chance to go to space in our lifetimes. Before the XPRIZE came along, I had almost given up hope of ever going. Now I was convinced my spaceman fantasy was not far from becoming reality. But rather than worry about the detail for now, I took another moment to look up at the skies, basking in the wonder of space, closer than ever before.

  The most incredible day turned into the most outrageous of nights. It seemed as though everybody in Mojave was crammed into the Mariah Inn’s tiny bar. I was hugging anybody within grabbing distance. I even proposed to the Iranian astronaut Anousheh Ansari on behalf of my son, forgetting she was already married! “Come on, you are very beautiful, Sam is very handsome, we are all very happy—let’s cap the night off!” President George W. Bush called the team from on board Air Force One and congratulated everyone. He was delighted to know the spirit of adventure and entrepreneurship was thriving in America. We resisted the temptation to suggest our aircraft was better than his—let alone our space program!

  Since the first person went into space in 1961, fewer than 500 others have followed, most of them male, white and English-speaking. It was great that those lucky hundreds had made it out of the atmosphere, but I was excited that we could help many more people from different countries, cultures and languages. As the cost per NASA space shuttle launch had grown to approximately $1.5 billion, we knew it was up to the new commercial space industry we were inventing to create the astronauts of the future. In a few glorious, high-octane seconds, SpaceShipOne had ushered in a brave new era of space innovation. For the first time, the sky was no longer the limit. Now, the really hard work be
gan. There was a multibillion-dollar private space industry just waiting for us to kick-start it. Virgin Galactic had liftoff.

  CHAPTER 11

  An Englishman in America

  For a long time when I traveled to the US the most common question I got asked in the street was: “Hey, are you that guy from Friends?” Indeed, I did sell a union flag hat to Joey and chat with Chandler in an episode of the classic sitcom, but it’s been quite a while since anybody asked me about it. Now, I am far more likely to be quizzed about Virgin America, our start-up US airline. When we began, nobody gave us a chance. The very idea of starting a new US airline in the post-9/11 climate was enough to get them rolling in the aisles and window seats. We were the first US domestic airline to form after 9/11, and most expert observers expected us to be the first to close down, too.

  Whenever I flew in America I encountered the same problems I used to find with international travel. The service was poor, prices were high, the entertainment was almost nonexistent, the food was barely edible and the customers were missing out. It felt like an accepted truth that cross-country American flights were something to be endured rather than enjoyed. We saw it as a real chance to disrupt a sector where we already had expertise, in a key market where the Virgin brand was loved, but had room to expand. Why not make flying good again, instead of treating customers like cattle?

  In early 2004, we I tasked a tiny team in New York to turn Virgin America into a functioning airline. Fred Reid came on board as CEO. The team’s first decision was where to base our fledgling airline. We considered several cities, from Washington, DC, to Boston, but against accepted wisdom we chose San Francisco. The arguments against were numerous: the airport was overcrowded and needed investment; the weather was foggy and unreliable; the labor market was tough. But I was amazed when I realized such a thriving location, with Silicon Valley on its doorstep and tourists all year round, didn’t have a hometown airline. Befitting their new home, Virgin America had a start-up mentality from the beginning. After some long, hard months, we introduced our first plane to the world that October. As a nod to another group formed in San Francisco, we called it Jefferson Airplane after the legendary band.