Finding My Virginity: The New Autobiography

by Richard Branson

  By the end of 2005, we also reached an agreement with the state of New Mexico for the building of the world’s first spaceport. It would cost $200 million to build the spaceport in the south of the state, covering twenty-seven square miles and including a dedicated terminal and hangar, medical facilities, clubhouses, offices and Mission Control. New Mexico’s climate, free airspace, low-population density, high altitude and stunning scenery made it the perfect spot from which astronauts could appreciate the wonders of space. But the clincher was the professionalism and enthusiasm of Secretary Rick Homans and his team—they were (almost!) as excited about space as we were.

  With our spaceline and spaceport in development, it was time to show our vision of what Virgin Galactic would look like. We brought in design guru Philippe Starck to create a new identity that reflected our project’s vision. When I met him, he spent a lot of time staring at me intensely.

  “Your eyes are perfect,” he said.

  “They are?” I asked, flattered but a little confused.

  Then he explained his concept around the beautiful image of a nebulous iris, through millions of years of evolution, signifying our opportunity to look back at Earth from space. He took images of my own eye and turned them into a logo that really stirred me. Now that we had our branding, I was desperate to show off what our spaceship and mothership would look like, inside and out. I wanted it to be large enough for people to have a real experience in space.

  “I don’t just want to be strapped tight into a seat in a chunk of metal, blasted to space and back again without seeing anything,” I told the design team. “I want people to come back changed by what they have witnessed—we need big windows, comfortable seats and the space to float around in zero gravity.”

  We debated ships big enough for four, six, even ten people. Burt sent his team on a series of parabolic arc flights so they could get a sense of what was possible in a weightless space. They came back confident they could scale up SpaceShipOne’s smaller design into a beautiful, functional, safe aircraft.

  As momentum built, we began looking into partnerships with the wider space community. Ever since I had watched the moon landing, NASA had always been the pinnacle of space travel, setting the standard all of us who came after aspired to. Now, as NASA stepped away from manned space travel, we knew they would still play an integral part in space’s future. We discussed ideas for how we could work together, finally signing an agreement to collaborate on future manned space technology. They also made their unique facilities at the NASA Ames Research Center in California available to us. More than anything, it was a huge acknowledgment of acceptance from the industry at a very early stage of Virgin Galactic’s development.

  Then, just when everything seemed to be going perfectly, a tragic accident shook us all.

  —

  Thursday, 26 July 2007, should have been a great day for Virgin Galactic. Stephen Attenborough, who had become Virgin Galactic’s first full-time employee when he joined as commercial director, was in New Mexico with Alex Tai as part of the architectural judging panel for the spaceport. He called me with the news that Norman Foster, probably the greatest living architect, and a Brit to boot, had won our global competition to design the world’s first spaceport. His otherworldly design made the spaceport feel as if it was emerging mysteriously out of the desert. It was simultaneously an ecologically sound continuation of the landscape and a space-age marvel. I loved it.

  Stephen and Alex were driving through the desert to Las Cruces, where we were to make the announcement. As they pulled into a gas station to refuel and grab an ice cream to cool down, the Scaled Composites team called Alex, who immediately called me on Necker. I was just returning from a walk around the island, and answered cheerily, expecting more details about Norman Foster.

  It was one of those moments that turned from fun to horror in an instant.

  “Richard, you better sit down,” Alex said. “There has been an explosion in Mojave.”

  That day, Scaled Composites had been preparing for a routine “cold flow” test. At 2:34 p.m. on the northeastern edge of the Mojave airport, they were testing the propellant flow system for SpaceShipTwo. This did not mean igniting the rocket motor at all, or even lighting a fire—it was simply to examine the rate at which the propellant would flow through a new valve opening. A two-meter-long spherical tank made of carbon fiber was filled with nitrous oxide, which Scaled used to provide the oxygen its rocket fuel needs to burn. It should have been routine: nitrous oxide isn’t even usually considered hazardous—you’ve probably come across it at the dentist as laughing gas—and Burt’s team had carried out many similar tests for SpaceShipOne.

  But this time it was different.

  Seventeen people were there watching the test. Six of them moved back to a control post more than 100 meters away to watch on closed-circuit television, protected by a bunker of earth and a shipping container. The other eleven members of the team moved behind a fence, less than 10 meters away from the test site. When the nitrous oxide was ignited, the tank exploded. The sound was likened to a 500-pound bomb. The bottom of the tank broke apart violently, and carbon fiber and concrete from the pad below flew into the air. Shards of carbon fiber ripped into the engineers standing nearby.

  More members of the Scaled team were sitting in Building 75, and heard the explosion in the distance. They hardly stirred—it simply sounded like a sonic boom, a fairly common noise in Mojave, which is a busy supersonic flight corridor. But Chuck Coleman, one of Scaled’s engineers who was watching the test, somehow stumbled across to the office and began waving his arms and shouting for help. As he spoke, he didn’t realize that huge shards of carbon fiber were sticking out of his body.

  A great cloud of dust flew up into the Mojave air, concealing the tragic scene. When it settled, the horrible truth of what had happened was revealed. Glenn May, who had been away from Mojave for the previous year and only returned to work at Scaled Composites that week, was dead. His colleagues Todd Ivens and Eric Blackwell were also killed: they were the first fatalities in commercial spaceflight’s history. Jason Kramb, Keith Fitzsinger and Gene Gisin, meanwhile, were all seriously injured and required surgery.

  The news was devastating. I sent my deepest sympathies to the loved ones of those who had died, and all those affected. We canceled our spaceport announcement out of respect and Scaled set about finding out what had happened. Burt, who had been away from Mojave, rushed to the desert. He was distraught—it was the first time in a long and distinguished career in aerospace that he had ever lost anybody. Now he had lost three people in one day. A few weeks later I flew over to see him and found myself face-to-face with a broken man. He looked as if he had aged twenty years overnight. He was very quiet and all his usual exuberance had been extinguished in a flash. He could hardly walk, had trouble breathing and appeared to be wasting away. He took a lot of the blame on himself for not getting the safety aspects right, and for not being there when the explosion happened. You could see the responsibility physically weighing on his slumped shoulders.

  It turned out Burt had developed a serious medical issue and was diagnosed with constrictive pericarditis, a hardening of the sac around the heart. While Burt, as a man of engineering principles, refused to believe the stress from the accident contributed to his condition, I can’t help thinking it did. He was literally broken-hearted. His wife, Tonya, agreed. But they didn’t sit around feeling sorry for themselves. Together, they set up a fund to support the families of those who had passed away.

  It was vital the cause of the accident was pinpointed so that it could never happen again at Scaled or any other space company. The California Occupational Safety and Health Administration launched an investigation into the accident and Scaled launched their own with experts from across the industry, including representatives from Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman. The inquiries did not determine exactly what had caused the explosi
on, but the California State investigation into the accident fined Scaled for failing to observe correct workplace practices.

  I spent a lot of time soul-searching. I went on a pre-dawn walk by myself on Necker, thinking long and hard about what to do next.

  After talking to the survivors, as well as the relatives of those who had died, I concluded we should press on.

  But we were to continue without another key member. Not long after the investigation, Burt stepped down as the head of Scaled Composites. At the end of 2010, he announced his retirement. Soon after, thirty-six years since the day he arrived in Mojave, he left his pyramid and moved to a ranch in Idaho.

  CHAPTER 15

  Four-Play

  Business can sometimes be about being in the right place at the right time. That was the case in April 2005, when I ran—in this case literally—into Simon Duffy, the CEO of cable communications company NTL.

  I was in Central Park, New York, making the most of the spring weather by going for a run between meetings: that little bit of exercise helps to keep my mind as well as my body fresh. As I passed by the zoo, miles away in my own world, I bumped into someone coming the other way. As I stopped to apologize, I realized I knew who it was.

  “Simon!” I gasped.

  “Richard! Small world,” he grinned.

  “Yes,” I wheezed, “but quite a big park.”

  We sat down on a nearby bench and caught up. It was a slightly different setup from my usual business meetings, wiping sweat from my beard, wearing somewhat different attire. Simon and I knew each other well; we first met when Thorn EMI acquired Virgin Records in 1992, and we had previously run our internet service provider Virgin.net as a joint venture, before NTL bought it outright in 2004. Simon told me that both NTL and Telewest were struggling to turn around their reputation for poor service, and wanted to make some major changes. He gave me the strong impression that he really respected the Virgin brand. I sensed an opportunity, so I invited him for a less sweaty meeting.

  In November 2004, Simon and Shai Weiss met Gordon McCallum and me to dig into the details. Over a pot of tea, Simon introduced Shai, who complimented the mock-up cruise ship on my table—an idea to make cruising appeal to a younger generation, which would come to fruition twelve years later with Virgin Voyages. He told us NTL was merging with Telewest, and he had a proposal that might interest us. Guessing what it might be, I wasn’t immediately gripped by the prospect; in a recent survey, NTL had come fiftieth out of fifty when it came to brand loyalty, and Telewest wasn’t much better, whereas Virgin was the most respected brand in the UK. But what he suggested next caught my attention—his pitch, with no slides or notes, explained that they wanted to get rid of the NTL and Telewest brands altogether and call the company Virgin Media.

  “Let me get this straight: you are suggesting rebranding your entire business under the Virgin umbrella?”

  “Yes—but that’s not the really interesting part. The deal would also include Virgin Mobile,” he added. They rightly anticipated Sky entering the broadband space and BT moving into TV, so wanted to get into mobile. With our brand power and wide-ranging offerings, we were the perfect candidate to create a formidable competitor to Sky and BT.

  Shai explained how we could launch the world’s first “quad-play” business, offering cable television, broadband internet, landline phones and mobile all in one simple package. Getting people’s business across such a broad range of products would mean we could keep costs low and reinvest in infrastructure and services. It sounded amazing: I was ready to be swept away by the idea, but didn’t want to let on. We would have a big negotiation ahead. I did my best poker face, nodded a lot and kept quiet, all the while inside thinking “whoopee!” at how transformational this business could be for our brand. Just as Virgin Megastores were waning on the high street, this could bring us into the digital world and give us a major presence in people’s homes.

  My only concern was the terrible customer service reputation that NTL and Telewest had. NTL was hated by the press and, worse, consumers referred to it as NT-Hell. Could our team turn that around like they’d done with British Rail on the West Coast Main Line? Could we turn them from the worst into the best? I believed we could. The deal, though, was far from straightforward. Many of our businesses were joint ventures, usually with us owning 51 percent. Brand royalties were factored in, but we would charge only a token rate and earn the main money through the equity. This time we put more value on the brand, creating a more predictable way of earning. As well as agreeing a brand royalty, I also wanted to limit the potential damage of putting our name on two companies with the lowest customer satisfaction in the UK. Long, complicated negotiations began. The four of us reconvened in New York on 11 September 2005, an emotional day to be in the city on the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, with jets flying overhead. We ironed out the deal over lunch in the Four Seasons, then went for a stroll in Central Park, where a reporter promptly spotted me posing for photos with tourists. He asked what I was doing in town and who the businessmen with me were. We were eager to keep the deal secret, so I pushed Simon and Shai away and bluffed my way out of it. “I’m just in town for the tennis,” I claimed. (It was half true—we saw Roger Federer beat Andre Agassi in his last Grand Slam final at Flushing Meadows that afternoon!) The deal didn’t leak and on 4 April 2006 a £962.4 million deal was agreed. We took on 10.7 percent of the shares in the new business (in exchange for Virgin Mobile), and the whole company would be called Virgin Media. On the day of the announcement, I took out a marker and wrote “Four-Play” on the wall rather than the planned “Quad-Play.” It certainly got people’s attention!

  The Virgin Media deal set a precedent, which has been replicated and modified for each Virgin business since, protecting the brand, but giving each company space to maneuver. Overnight, we had a new UK business with ten million customers and 13,000 employees. But we also had three different companies joined together very quickly, and a huge customer service problem to solve. We placed three Virgin veterans—James Kydd, Ashley Stockwell and Simon Dornan—to lead the culture in the right direction. We discovered, for instance, that NTL’s staff had been dealing with complaints by reading lifeless scripts—it was no wonder customers disliked them. We threw the scripts straight in the bin and gave our staff the freedom to be themselves. With this change and many others, the feedback started to improve, and gradually we started to turn their reputation around.

  For the first time, consumers could get everything they needed from one company. In one fell swoop, we became Britain’s number one broadband provider and largest mobile virtual network operator, as well as the second biggest pay TV and home phone provider. I felt thrilled that our way-of-life brand would be inside people’s homes every day.

  —

  Virgin Media was about to become the largest Virgin company in the world. While we were very excited, one man was very nervous. One very powerful man: Rupert Murdoch.

  Rumors had reached Rupert’s son James, CEO of British Sky Broadcasting, that we were about to acquire a majority stake in ITV, Britain’s first and largest commercial TV station. It was true. Our new company had more than 90 percent of the cable market, but when it came to content we were lagging behind. Sky had tapped into Britain’s national religion by getting the rights to top-level football—no matter the cost. I thought that ITV was really undervalued at the time, and if we got hold of it we could really make a dent in Sky’s TV dominance. The Murdoch family had other ideas. They decided to stop us no matter what it cost them.

  On 9 November 2006, we proposed a merger with ITV. Eight days later, BSkyB effectively blocked us by buying a 17.9 percent stake in ITV, costing Sky’s shareholders £940 million purely as an expensive spoiling tactic to stop our deal. I was furious. A few days later I was in Manchester for a last-throw-of-the-dice attempt to revive Virgin Megastores with a new UK music concept, under strict orders not to discuss ITV
. As film crews for BBC, ITV and Sky looked on, the first question was: “What do you really think about BSkyB’s deal with ITV?” I looked at the camera, considered how Murdoch already controlled most of Britain’s media, and decided to lay it out straight.

  “I think that Murdoch is a threat to democracy,” I said.

  Expanding on my theme, I went on to add, “If the Sun and the Sunday Times and Sky and the News of the World all come out in favor of one particular party, the election is going to be won by that particular party. We have got rid of democracy in this country and we might as well let Murdoch decide who is going to be our Prime Minister. His empire should be looked at by competition authorities and it should be decided if it’s good for democracy that one person has so much influence.”

  The rest of the afternoon went by in a blur, and I soon found myself back in my hotel suite. There was a big, white freestanding bath with cast-iron feet in the middle of the room, and I ran a bath, switching on the television as I jumped in. On Channel 4 News, presenter Jon Snow read their opening headline: “Branson calls Murdoch threat to democracy.”

  As the piece finished, my first instinct was to call my dad. “Did you catch the news?” I asked.