Destination Space

Space has always been a dream for me, born of a love of aviation and flying that goes back to my early childhood. Not only was my mother one of the first international female flight crew at the end of WWII, but my parents were friends with the legendary legless flying ace Sir Douglas Bader who regaled me with visions of reaching for the sky. This diary charts the dream of the world’s first commercial human space launch system becoming a reality...

21 July 1969

Three days after my 19th birthday, I watch the Moon landing at home with my parents. Given the pace of change over the previous few years, they both think it’s possible that I will fly into space in my lifetime. Then a young entrepreneur in the throes of starting a mail order record business, they’re words I’ve never forgotten.

1988-1989

Have in-depth discussions with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and various cosmonauts about hitching a ride on the Soyuz rocket to the Mir Space Station for “only” $5-10 million. The invasion of Kuwait and the collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to these plans. But the question of why getting into space is so expensive and difficult begins to interest me.

December 1995

I’m sitting in a bar in Marrakesh, waiting for the weather to pick up for the launch of my record-breaking round the world high-altitude balloon attempt. Buzz Aldrin has joined me in Morocco to check out the capsule, which will be home to myself and two others for up to 10 days, circumnavigating the globe in the jetstream winds above 35,000 feet. I ask Buzz why space is so expensive, why rockets are launched from the ground and why balloons have never been used to carry rockets into the stratosphere before launch to avoid the huge amount of energy needed at sea level. His reply is the kernel of the Virgin Galactic system. Buzz explains that the US experimented in the 1950s with balloon-launched rockets and more importantly the X-15 air launch space plane. But these projects were all abandoned due to the need to concentrate on Apollo and the race to the Moon. I park in the back of my mind that commercialising space could be interesting and ask Will Whitehorn, who later becomes President of Virgin Galactic, to keep an eye on the field.

April 1998

Peter Diamandis, Founder of the Ansari XPrize for the first commercial human space flight, visits Will and I at Virgin’s Holland Park office to ask if we’ll sponsor the prize. I tell him we won’t, but we might well invest in the winner. None of the so-called experts believe the prize can ever be won!

March 1999

Will registers the name Virgin Galactic and we both go to look at a project in Mojave called the Rotary Rocket Company – an X-Prize contender desperately short of money and in need of investment. The project looks pretty hopeless but we get the chance to visit the factory of aerospace engineer Burt Rutan. He makes a convincing argument that the best way to lower the cost and improve the safety of space flight would be an air launch system.

November 2003

While Burt is building the world’s first all carbon composite jet for Virgin Atlantic (later piloted by Steve Fossett around the world on a single tank of fuel), he shows Virgin Atlantic Captain Alex Tai and Will the spaceship he’s building for ex-Microsoft boss Paul Allen. I get a pretty excited phone call from Will, and the process of buying the rights to Burt’s XPrize contender SpaceShipOne begins.

27 September 2004

At a press conference at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, Burt and I announce the formation of Virgin Galactic. But few people at the Virgin 33 Group believe in the idea or that a
private space project on this scale can ever be funded.

4 October 2004

The first successful X-Prize winning flight by SpaceShipOne takes place in the Mojave Desert. As the pilot Brian Binnie steps out of the cockpit, he’s simply awe-struck by what he’s just done – consistent with every astronaut I have ever met, he talks of having had an almost spiritual experience. Pilot Mike Melville completes a second successful flight. In just a hand-built carbon composite spaceship, with a budget less than NASA’s weekly wage bill, these men went up as pilots and came back as astronauts! My memory of chatting to them after their flights will always stay with me.

November 2004-April 2005

So much is happening so fast. The US Congress passes legislation to allow commercial human space flight – both Will and Burt have to give evidence. Meanwhile, we start selling tickets. It quickly becomes clear that we can’t simply rebuild SpaceShipOne, as research shows space tourists will only pay $200K if they can experience weightlessness by moving around in a large enough cabin. This is a pivotal moment for Virgin Galactic as that research sets the parameters for the future business. The Galactic team argue successfully that the launch system should be capable of many other things, such as human in-the-loop space science and an unmanned orbiting satellite launch.

May 2005-May 2006

The design commences of WhiteKnightTwo [the mothership that will launch SpaceShipTwo] and the spaceship itself. It’s clear they’re going to be big compared to the X-Prize vehicles and at some stage we’ll need deeper pockets to fund them than originally thought. This is when the twin-hulled design for WhiteKnightTwo emerges, which will allow the carrier plane to be more flexible – both as a training vehicle for astronauts and a launch platform for rockets other than SpaceShipTwo.

3 July 2005

Burt and I go to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to show off the XPrize-winning spaceship and our own Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, which has just circumnavigated the globe. Both systems look wonderful in the summer sun and attract record crowds of literally hundreds of thousands. I meet some of the first customers, whose enthusiasm is infectious. I’m particularly struck by designer Philipe Starck’s incredible passion for space.

27 September 2006

The first interior designs of the spaceship are unveiled at the NextFest show in New York. Customers and the world’s media ‘wow’ in awe at a really cool animation of a future space flight. For the first time, I realise that if we can build it, customers will come in their thousands. It’s after this event that ticket sales really start to take off.

November 2006

Construction of WhiteKnightTwo starts at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California. Project Director, Jonathan Firth, who’s overseen big projects like the Pendolino tilting train, makes it clear that we have no easy task on our hands.

27 November 2006

The first group of Virgin Galactic customers visit me at my home on Necker Island in the Caribbean. I remember I have to call them astronauts! In one of the most memorable moments of the project so far, we sit around listening to Stephen Hawking explaining to John Humphrys on the Today programme on Radio 4, why mankind must both explore and colonise space and not leave it to robots if we are to survive as a civilisation. This alone would be enough for any space enthusiast, but he then drops the bombshell that he’d like to fly on Virgin Galactic, so I get on the phone to him straight away.

July 2007

We finalise an agreement with the Government of the State of New Mexico for a spaceport to be built beside the old White Sands missile base where the first V2 Rockets were flown in the fledgling US space programme in the 1940s.

27 July 2007

Tragedy strikes. While doing a cold pressure test of nitrous oxide, which will be the future fuel oxidiser for the spaceship, three of Burt Rutan’s team are killed in a terrible, million to one accident, which Burt himself later describes as his “Apollo fire moment” in a reference to the equally tragic 1967 accident. A long investigation gets to the roots of the issue. Virgin remains staunchly committed to the project, but this sad event reminds everyone that safety must be paramount in this new race into space.

3 January 2008

The final designs for the whole space launch system are unveiled in New York. But I’m very worried as Burt Rutan is clearly not well. He has degenerative heart disease but can’t get to the bottom of what’s wrong. Fortunately, within weeks he’s being operated on at the Mayo Clinic where they discover a membrane over his heart. Days after the op he’s a new man. I distinctly remember him telling me that, apart from his family, all that kept him alive during that time was the Galactic project.

27 July 2008

The finished WhiteKnightTwo mothership is unveiled at Scaled Composites in Mojave. It feels like the whole world is there – literally planeloads of customers, journalists, government officials and scientists fly in to see this amazing vehicle. But we keep the actual spaceship under wraps in the corner. As storm clouds gather, the moneymen tell me about the looming credit crisis and the importance of finding “second-round funding”, as it is known, for the final phases of the Galactic project if we’re going to guarantee its success in the coming recession.

21 December 2008

WhiteKnightTwo flies for the first time. At a time when the world’s economy is collapsing, it’s a truly beautiful and inspirational sight. Virgin businesses are holding up well, but we need to find a partner for Galactic. The logical place to look is the Middle East, so we begin conversations with several potential investors. One group stand out, as they’re interested not only in space tourism and a spaceport, but in developing satellite launch technologies.

28 July 2009

Back in Oshkosh, I fly in WhiteKnightTwo for the first time in front of the world’s media and half a million people. It’s an exciting day, made even more amazing by the fact that we sign a deal with Aabar Investments of Abu Dhabi to invest $280 million in Virgin Galactic to see it through to its commercial launch and another $100 million to develop a satellite launch system to allow satellites of up to 200 kg to be launched from WhiteKnightTwo. Business Week magazine describes the event as the “Netscape moment” for commercial space in reference to the famous investment in that company, which heralded the internet investment revolution. After six months of successful flight tests of the mothership, rocket motor firings, and final completion work on SpaceShipTwo, I can see the end of the beginning of the most exciting project I’ve ever been involved in. I’m looking forward to the spaceship being unveiled and flown for the first time next year. 