Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m delighted to welcome you to the fourth of our Science Week lecture series for 2008. Discover Science and Engineering, in association with the Science Gallery, are bringing together some leading speakers during Science Week to share their experiences of science and technology with you all. We’re delighted to welcome Stephen Attenborough, who’s commercial director for Virgin Galactic, which is on track to becoming the world’s first passenger-carrying commercial space line. So I for one am really looking forward to hearing what he has to tell us. Our MC for this evening is Liz Bonnin, and Liz started her career presenting on RTE Television, and then she moved to the UK to present a number of programmes on, for different TV channels. And she’s a regular presenter on Top of the Pops and a number of programmes for Living TV. And most recently she presented the Science Friction programme on RTE. So I’ll hand you over to Liz now.
Very sorry to say that Top of the Pops is no longer with us, but, yeah, it was good fun at the time. It’s very nice to see all of you. It’s my great pleasure to welcome you here tonight on behalf of Discover Science and Engineering for a very special lecture in this Science Week series. Now, this evening’s subject is space travel. Now, I don’t know about you, but it’s definitely not something I thought I could be able to do in my lifetime, but it has definitely become a reality. Now, Virgin Galactic is wholly owned by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, and is the world’s first passenger carrying space liner, promising people like you and me the ultimate entertainment experience. Now, our guest speaker this evening is Virgin Galactic’s commercial director, responsible not only for selling the seats, but also for managing the entire space-going experience, from the training all the way to landing back on terra firma in one piece. It’s my great pleasure to welcome Mr Stephen Attenborough.
Thank you, Liz, and I’ve never been on stage with somebody who’s presented Top of the Pops before so, you know, that’s a first and a great privilege. So anyway, great to be here tonight. Thanks for turning out on a cold Dublin night, and I think we’ve got some quite exciting things to tell you and to show you this evening.
My life changed quite dramatically, actually, in 2004. I had been working in a much duller industry for most of my career before that, and I was actually between jobs and was standing, funnily enough, at the top of a ladder doing some painting of a little house we have, and the phone rang and I got it out of my pocket and answered it, and it was Richard Branson, which is a really bad thing to happen when you’re at the top of a ladder, because your natural inclination is to take a step back. But anyway, he said after a little bit that Virgin was about to start a new business, and they’d like to talk to me about possibly playing a role in that. And so I said, ‘Well, that’s very flattering, and I would love to talk about it. What is it?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’re planning to start the world’s first space line and take thousands of people into space.’ And I went a little quiet at that, really, because I don’t know if you’re aware of the old adage that if you want – the best way to become a millionaire is to become a billionaire and then start an airline.
And I thought, well, if that’s the case with an airline, you know, it’s certainly going to be the case with a space line, I would have thought. But then I thought, well, here’s a guy that has started several airlines and he still seems to be a billionaire, so maybe this is the person to do it. And the more I got to know about the project, the more I felt that this was a fantastically exciting opportunity personally, but also a very important project, and one that had a unique set of criteria, I suppose, which made me believe, and I believe that even more now, that we have a unique opportunity to really change things for the better.
So tonight I want to take you through a presentation, and I also want to play you a few DVDs. This is a very visually-rich project. You’d get very bored, I think, to hear me just speaking for an hour. So I want to kick off, actually, to give you a bit of an introduction to this project, to hear from the man himself who’s paying for it, and to give a little bit of a flavour for what we’re up to, and then I’ll sort of go back and tell you the context of what we’re doing in a bit more detail. So without further ado, maybe we could just play the first bit of film.
Burt Rutan, Lead SpaceShipTwo and MotherShip Designer
I absolutely have to develop a manned space tourism system that’s a least 100 times... Space is absolutely crucial. It’s about communications. It’s about logistics and improvements in... He’s just an incredible entrepreneur and a very... The important thing about today’s accomplishment is this is not the end, it’s just a very good beginning.
Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic Chief
This will be a trip like no other. It will give those that travel with us a unique and life-changing perspective of our planet. For most of us, escaping the constraints of gravity is something we’ve only been able to achieve in our dreams. Until now. Virgin Galactic is now on the final stretch to becoming the world’s first commercial space line. Our sub-orbital space trips promise to be the most intense and wonderful experiences that our passengers have ever had. We, and I hope you, will be travelling on a spaceship owned and operated by Virgin Galactic. Our spacecraft have been designed so that each of our passengers will have the room and the freedom to enjoy the amazing sensation of weightlessness. Large panoramic windows will allow you to see clearly the curved earth, over 100km below, and the colours of the fragile atmosphere, protecting our vulnerable planet.
It would also be at the heart of our ability to offer a breathtaking journey in an environment which will be as safe as we can possibly make it, and of course in the style that Virgin is so rightly recognised for. We have spent many years in a, frankly, fairly futile search for technology that could be developed into a vehicle which would meet our specifications for safety, environmental impact, and commercial viability, and of course, the potential for a great customer experience. Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne and those flawless history-making enterprise flights in 2004 suddenly changed all that, and we grabbed the opportunity.
Burt Rutan
We showed that it is feasible for industry to develop and fly manned spacecraft. But the more important thing is that what we did on our programmes to develop safety solutions... SpaceShipTwo has a unique feathering configuration. And what that does, it allows it to re-enter the atmosphere, but in a carefree fashion. And what that means, is the pilot or a computer doesn’t have to perfectly line it up. It can come into the atmosphere at any angle, it’ll straighten itself out without the pilot having to fly that, or the computer having to do it. It’s just that simple.
Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic
The beauty of Burt’s feathering device on SpaceShipTwo is that it combines the best features of reentry using, basically, the atmosphere as a brake and not having to fly a flight profile, with the fact that you can then change the shape of the ship at 50,000 feet back into a normal glider and land on a normal runway, as people would do in the shirtsleeves environment of normal aircraft. We’re looking at only a three-day training schedule for flight into space. We would have psychologically attuned you to the greatest ride of your life.
Well, the day that Burt won the X Prize was a hugely significant one for us. I remember chatting to Brian Binnie, the pilot of that epic flight. He said it was a journey of contrast, describing the enormous forces that pinned him to his seat, and the tremendous noise as the spaceship powered out of the atmosphere. Then suddenly, the dramatic and absolute silence of space.
Brian Binnie, X-Prize Winning Astronaut
The vibrations go away, the shrieking and shrilling noise of that rocket motor disappears, and you get this instant karma weightlessness. The tunnel is pulled back, and for your eyes only this black void in space. It’s a mystery, but, you know, you get a sense of its majesty as well. There’s this panorama like you’ve never seen. It’s majestic. And separating these two extremes, you know, is this thin blue electric ribbon of light that’s the atmosphere. You cannot appreciate the experience just by looking at a magazine cover, just what it is like to take it in with your own eyes. And everything you feel in your body is the same way. It’s, ‘Wow.’
Richard Branson
Since the announcement in 2004, the project has reached and passed many important milestones. We have a truly inspiring design for our home at Spaceport America in New Mexico, an ever increasing family of pioneering customers, and of course beautiful new vehicles, now in an extensive test programme before they start commercial service. Our first Virgin Galactic astronauts are booking their own place in history as pioneers of a new space age. And for them, the journey has already started.
Speaker
To be part of this club is a great learning experience. You’re meeting great people. You’re really contributing to something very different.
Speaker
From doing the events with Richard in the Caribbean to New York to LA, it’s just been a whole exciting, entirely amazing experience.
Speaker
I’ve gotten to meet people from all over the world, people in all types of occupations and all different backgrounds, from which they had a desire to go into space.
Richard Branson
Like many of our future fellow astronauts, I’ve already completed my centrifuge experience with my son. It was an incredible ride, a great preparation that really brought home to us just how aweinspiring it will be at that moment, when the Virgin spaceship is released from the Virgin mothership, and starts its supersonic climb to space. Virgin Galactic will be using clean and safe technology, technology that is many thousands of times more environmentally friendly than any previous manned space vehicle. Already, Virgin Galactic’s carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, is the world’s largest all-carbon composite aircraft. With the end of the oil era approaching and climate change progressing faster than most models have been predicting, safer, cheaper and more flexible access to space is essential.
Will Whitehorn
Access to space really does matter for the future of mankind. And currently, we only have 50yearold space systems to get there, which are very expensive and very environmentally damaging. But if we can get robust, safe, and, more importantly, environmentally benign and very cheap access to space, we can do things up there that were never imagined a few years ago.
Richard Branson
Well, I hope you will be as excited and inspired by Virgin Galactic’s mission as I am. And, see you up there.
Stephen Attenborough
Thank you. Well, I hope that gives a little taste of what we’re up to. And what I’d like to do now is take a step back. And one of the things that certainly crossed my mind when I first started at Galactic is, you know, why would any company want to do this? I mean, going to space is notoriously risky. It’s notoriously expensive. Things tend to go wrong. And, you know, I think to understand the context of why we’re doing this, you have this – useful just to understand a little bit about the way that Virgin operates. We have about 200 companies now in the group. Turnover of about 20 billion. About 40,000 people work now for a Virgin company. And, you know, from vodka to airlines. And it’s a very entrepreneurial structure, and I think that Richard tends to start companies and promote companies where he feels that there’s either a cartel in operation or the public are just not being well served.
Now, he was a kid from the 1960s, and I suspect there are one or two other kids from the 1960s here tonight who remember what a fantastic decade that was in terms of development of access to space. You know, we started in the late 1950s, where really nothing manmade had been to space at all, and we finished the 1960s with two men stepping onto the moon. It was a very extraordinary decade. And those kids that grew up in the 1960s, including Richard and others, you know, their parents were telling them at the time that they’d be going to space on a regular basis by 1978, you know, and they were looking forward to that. And it didn’t happen. And we’ll talk about the reasons it didn’t happen in a moment. But that is a very natural sort of business area for Virgin to get involved in, where there’s demand which is not being met because, for whatever reason, the public is not being able to get its hands on a service. So I think it sort of fitted in quite well, as far as that was concerned.
Virgin, of course, is also the story of a man, and the way that Richard tends to do business, and certainly did business with Galactic, is to announce early. And in fact Virgin Galactic was in fact registered as a business back in the late 1990s, and Richard announced one day, probably to the surprise of most people, that Virgin was going to take people to space within a decade. And I think we’re just about going to make that, actually. At the time he had no idea how he was going to do it, but decided it would be a good thing to do and it ought to be possible, considering that people had been going to space for, sort of, 45 years. So to commercialise that seemed to him to be an obvious thing to do, and it was really about time that somebody got hold of this and opened it for the desires and wishes of ordinary people around the world.
It also fitted very nicely into an investment ethos that we developed at Virgin at the beginning of this century. And I just want to talk a little bit about that, because it’s very important, I think, to understand why we’re doing this project for the longer term. We want to give people a fantastic experience. It’s very important that those people signed up early in order to support the development programme. But we have a longer term aim here. And it comes down to, as I say, an ethos or a philosophy which we’ve developed, and we apply to most of the investments that we make within the group now. A lot of our businesses are involved in transportation. Transportation takes energy, and most of that energy at the moment comes from fossil fuels. And it became very evident to us, I guess, sort of nine or 10 years ago, that the impact of peak oil, whenever that happens, and humaninduced climate change was going to be a future key driver of company financial performance.
And within this paradigm, there were clearly going to be losers and winners. In our view, the losers would be the people that really looked on this issue as a marketing thing, that you needed to tick the right boxes, maybe do a little carbon offset or whatever. But the winners in this new environment would be those companies that really grabbed hold of this as a serious issue, but also a serious opportunity, and became the carbon-efficient sector mould breakers. And we obviously wanted to be in the winning category. And our belief is that, with oil – this figure keeps changing every time I do presentations, but let’s assume, longerterm, that oil is going to be at least $100 a barrel, that in that sort of environment this is going to become an industrial survival issue. And so we look at this, you know, we look at climate change, we look at the challenges that come from peak oil and the rising cost of energy in very commercial terms, and we believe there are huge opportunities there both to do some good and continue to be a winning company in the future.
And let me give you an example of the sort of thing that we’ve done, before I then put it in the context of the space business. This rather beautiful aeroplane was built by a guy called Burt Rutan, who you saw on the film, and we’ll be hearing a lot more about in the next few minutes. And it was called the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer. And it was built for a particular purpose. It was built so that Steve Fossett, who sadly died last year, could break a record. He wanted to be the first guy to fly solo around the world, a single circumnavigation on a single tank of fuel, non-stop, on his own, which was a pretty crazy thing to want to do, but he wanted to do it nevertheless. And Burt Rutan reckoned he could build him an aircraft that would do it. Virgin Atlantic wanted to get involved, or the Virgin group wanted to get involved, and paid for half of this project, because we wanted to show, as an airline operator, that there were better ways of running aircraft, more fuel efficient ways of building and running aircraft, particularly using carbon composite materials, and this aircraft was entirely made out of carbon fibre, which made it very light, very strong, and very fuel efficient. And our purpose behind that was to say to the Boeings and the Airbuses of this world, ‘Look,’ you know, ‘as Virgin Atlantic, if we’re going to continue to buy your aircraft in the future, you need to take note of this, because we’re going to be buying those aircraft which are the most fuel efficient, because this is going to be a big issue in the future.’
And as a result of this project – it was successful, of course, Steve Fossett managed to get right round the world, it was a remarkable achievement, and a very beautiful aircraft – as a result of that and other projects, you have Boeing now, for example, in advanced stages of the 787 Dreamliner, which is a 50% carbon composite aircraft. It’s 30% more fuelefficient than anything else in its class, and we’re the launch customers of that aircraft, because, you know, we want the best that’s out there in order to continue to do what we do, but in a better way.
And at the same time, we’re also working with GE, the engine manufacturers of the 787, to develop and to flight test biofuels. Now, biofuels, of course, are surrounded by a lot of controversy. They’re not a silver bullet, but they do have a future, and we believe they have a future providing they come from the right sources in the aviation industry. And we actually flew a 747 from London to Amsterdam with one engine, which was fuelled purely by biofuel, earlier this year, first time that had been done. So that’s the sort of context, the sort of ethos, that we’re trying to apply across businesses.
Now, I want to change subject a little bit, because one of the things that’s happened since I’ve started in this project is we’ve met some pretty crazy and some pretty interesting people, and this is certainly one of them. He was one of the early people to sign up for a ticket to space. His name’s Philippe Starck. He is a very famous French designer, and he’s also very passionate about aviation and aerospace, and very passionate about what we’re doing in order to improve space access and open space to ordinary people. And one of the things that Philippe did was to offer his services to us, and said, you know, ‘I’d like to really help you with branding and design, because I think it’s very important that the way you’re seen is really reflecting what it is that you’re doing in the longer term.’ And he came up with our rather nice iris logo, and he also came up with a sort of secondary logo, which he calls the DNA of Flight. Because Philippe’s view, and our view, is that there is a continuum here, that man’s desire to explore and to travel is very much in our DNA, you know, pushing boundaries, exploring new borders, and continually, the urge to discover has very much made us, you know, the species that we are today, and that the history of aviation and space travel is a perfect example of that.
And what I thought I would do is just to sort of trace that quickly, just to give you, again, the context of what it is that we’re doing. So, you have a little DNA here, which is made up of different aircraft and spacecraft, and actually the first one is a person with wings, and of course that’s Icarus. And this really shows, I think, that, you know, the desire to fly, to rise above the world, has been in man’s dreams, really, since time began. And this, of course, is a lovely legend, and the thing that I like about it more than anything else is that, of course, you know, Icarus did fly very successfully, and the only thing that really let the whole project down was that he was having such a good time, which, I think, you know, says a lot about flight and exploration.
We then move to, you know, 1,000 or so years later and to the Wright brothers, who, right at the beginning of the last century, at last cracked that huge challenge, which was to provide powered, heavier-than-air flight. And they’re a remarkable couple of guys, and it’s well worth reading the history of this, because, you know, they went through terrible times when they really believed that they would never achieve what they were trying to achieve. And in fact, I think, just a year or 18 months before they had that first incredible powered flight, you know, one of the brothers said to the other that he thought it could be another thousand years before their dreams were achieved. So the determination, and just the keep plugging away, and the eventual success, you know, was a huge milestone in what we’re doing today. And the incredible thing, of course, was that after hundreds, if not thousands, of years of people trying to do that, as soon as it was done, things moved on very, very quickly, and within a few years you had hundreds of pilots around the world, travelling around in small aircraft, mainly barnstorming for pleasure, the start of early commercial services.
But it was this man, I guess, that could really be credited with the start of commercial aviation. He really lit the match that created the fire that we know today. And he, of course, is Charles Lindbergh. Now, Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic single-handed for the first time, from the US to Paris, in 1927 in an aircraft called the Spirit of St Louis, and it was a pretty remarkable achievement. Interestingly, he wasn’t the first man to cross the Atlantic by air. He was actually the 101st man, which I certainly never realised. But the first were two Brits, of course, Alcock and Brown, who did that in 1919 and landed here in Ireland. But nevertheless, Charles Lindbergh’s flight was something very special because he did it on his own. And, you know, he really provided the proof of concept that flying could be used for maybe something else other than just, you know, pleasure and the barnstorming and fun rides. And it was really that flight, for whatever reason, that, you know, you can trace back to the birth of commercial aviation.
As far as space travel was concerned, and supersonic travel, and of course, if you’re going to go to space, you’ve got to be at least supersonic and many times that in most cases, it was probably this guy, Chuck Yeager, in 1947, that was responsible for challenging the demon that was known as the sound barrier. You know, it was called the barrier because there were many people that felt that it just wasn’t possible for the human frame to withstand going faster than the speed of sound, or any machine, indeed, to do that. Chuck Yeager was, again, ‘the right stuff,’ of course, and he was a remarkable guy, prepared to take incredible risks, and actually broke his collarbone the night before the flight, but was so determined to do it he hid the fact, got in the plane, flew, and really that flight and the flights that came afterwards showed that you could fly at supersonic speeds, was, sort of, paved the way for the early days of space travel.
Commercial aviation, of course, it started with Charles Lindbergh, perhaps. It became a preserve for the rich, pretty much, for many years. And it was really this aircraft, probably more than any aircraft, that really heralded the start of mass commercial air travel that we know today. It was put together by Boeing, of course, and it was from an order by Pan Am. Juan Trippe, who was probably the greatest entrepreneur in aviation in history, asked Bill Allen from Boeing to build him an aeroplane that was 30% bigger, but would actually cost about 30% less per seat to run. And there was the famous interchange where Allen said to Trippe that, you know, if you – sorry, Trippe said to Allen, ‘If you build it, I’ll buy it.’ And Allen said to Trippe, you know, ‘If you buy it I’ll build it.’ And he did, and it was a remarkable aircraft. Interestingly, on that aircraft, you might not know this, but it was built in such a way that it had the big bulge on the front because they thought it would have a very limited lifetime, lifespan, probably four or five years, after which it would be overtaken by supersonic travel, because Concorde was on the way then, of course. And so it was designed so that nose would open, and it would become just a big, slow cargo plane, because they believed there’d be no interest in anything other than supersonic aircraft for passenger travel. It actually became the largest and most popular aircraft, you know, for about 37 years, until the A380 took over last year. And I think it’s an icon now, and probably no other aircraft represents the way that aviation has progressed from, you know, a sport to a pursuit for the rich to an industry which has really changed the world.
And that gets us to the giant leap for space. And as I say, the 1960s was a remarkable decade. NASA was a fantastic, freewheeling, risk-taking organisation. They were given a very clear mandate by JFK at the beginning of the 1960s to put a man on the moon and bring him home again safely by the end of the decade. And against all the odds, because it was a crazy thing to say, I mean, it was an impossible dream, but NASA managed to do that. And certainly, some of my earliest memories, and perhaps some of yours as well, is seeing those incredible black and white pictures of both Buzz and Neil stepping onto the moon, which still, I think, have the ability to inspire and amaze.
So that brings us to our part in the history of aviation and space. Now this is a picture that, you know, we see all the time. We’re always seeing pictures from space. They’re used in advertisements, they’re used for logos, they’re used all over the place. And it’s been a little bit ironic, I always think, that so many people know what the earth looks like from space, but actually an incredibly small number have actually seen it with their own eyes. And, you know, we’re still less than 500 people, or fewer than 500 people since the beginning of the 1960s that have managed to break free of this Earth’s atmosphere and get into the world beyond our world.
Now, this picture of space is a very different picture of space, because it wasn’t taken from a government satellite, it wasn’t taken from a government-employed astronaut. It was actually taken from SpaceShipOne by a private pilot called Brian Binnie. And SpaceShipOne on the 4th of October 2004 became the world’s first privatelydesigned, privatelyconstructed and privatelyflown spaceship to put a man in space and bring them back again. It was a remarkable achievement. And why was it such a remarkable achievement, and why was it so important? Well, because Houston did have a problem. They achieved, as I say, NASA did some great things in the 1960s. It had a definite mission. And it’s debatable about why and what happened after that to manned space travel. But I think in some ways it lost that sense of mission. It became a little bit confused as to what the logical next step was. And it still remained very much the preserve of the military and of government agencies.
And the big issue that we had as a budding space line back at the beginning of this century was that we needed vehicles that were capable of accessing space with ordinary people in them, and coming back safely. And we also knew that we had an imperative to be a commercial success. So we knew that we had to keep people safe, and we needed, knew that we needed to make money from the pursuit if we were going to be able to start a new business and a new industry. And looking around, which we did for two or three years after Richard made that first announcement, it came very clear to us that the existing technology all around the world was completely inadequate, because it was all based on ground-based rocket technology that had been produced pretty much during the Second World War. There had been no innovation, there had been no development, really, in the way that things and people had been sent to space over that 50-year period, which is extraordinary.
And here’s a good example. I mean, this is the monster of rockets, really, the Saturn V. But it’s a very good example of how the mindset has been about getting things and people into space, which is that you build, you know, a huge tower of a rocket. Almost all of it is full of fuel. So the people, of course, sit in that bit that you can hardly see right at the top. And most of that fuel is actually used in the initial stages of the flight, and it’s used in order to punch your way through the very thick atmosphere and reach velocities that are required to get into orbit. And the great problem with this, of course, is, firstly, that causing an enormous explosion at ground level, where the oxygen is at its thickest, is a pretty dangerous thing to do. The rockets that are used here, in this picture, and are still used today for the Shuttle and for Soyuz is solid rocket motors, which are very much like garden fireworks, and the big problem with them is that, although they’re pretty efficient at what they do, if you want to turn them off you can’t. So once they’re lit, you’re committed. And so, if anything goes wrong, anything goes amiss with any part of the technology in those first few seconds of flight, the people at the top need to get ejected very quickly, and they’re ejected at an enormous amount of Gs. And it’s survivable, just about, but it’s not the way that we could treat fare-paying customers. So we knew that this sort of technology was not going to meet our objectives of commercial viability and safety.
The other problem with this, of course, is that it’s hopelessly, you know, environmentally damaging. The energy used to get the Shuttle into space is roughly the equivalent to the energy used by the city of New York for a weekend. And these missions take months and months to prepare. They cost hundreds of millions. And the great shame about it, you know, in this day and age, of course, is that the whole lot is thrown away at the end. You know. Nothing survives. And that, again, is not any model for a commercial business. It’s a bit like with our airline, Virgin Atlantic. You know. Every time we flew a 747 to New York, we dumped it in the Hudson River and had a new one to come back again. You can’t run a business by throwing the technology away every time you’ve used it. So there was a big issue out there, and we got a little bit concerned about that, because it didn’t seem that there was really anything anywhere around the world that had any capability of being commercialised.
However, that changed, and it changed because of another kid from the 1960s, a guy that Virgin didn’t know. I mean, he was doing things independently. This is the man. He’s called Dr Peter Diamandis. And he was another kid from the 1960s who was getting very frustrated about nobody taking him to space. He wanted to go. He didn’t see why he couldn’t go, but he wasn’t being given the opportunity. And so, he actually was inspired by the story of Charles Lindbergh, funnily enough. And if you ever read the story of Lindbergh and the Spirit of St Louis, you’ll realise that Charles Lindbergh was inspired to make that single-handed flight across the Atlantic because of the existence of a prize. And actually, if you look at the history of aviation, a lot of the milestones were because of prizes. And the great thing about prizes is that they actually open up the potential of everybody. If you put up a big prize and say, ‘This is what I want to achieve,’ if you can achieve it, whoever you are, wherever you are, then you’ve won the prize. Then you’re really sort of extending, you know, the potential enormously of that job going down. If you just go to Boeing or Northrop or whoever it is and say, ‘This is the job I want done,’ then you’re reliant just on that group of engineers being able to have the ideas.
So Peter thought, well, this is a great idea to perhaps break the cartel and break the stalemate that we have in manned space travel. So he managed to raise $10 million, and he said to the world at large, ‘Here is it, the X Prize. Anybody that can build a suborbital spaceship privately, no government help at all, can build it and then fly it to space and back twice in the period of a fortnight with a man on board, you’ve got yourself $10 million.’ And it seemed a very simple plan, and suddenly he inspired engineers, designers all over the world to have a go at this.
And one man who put his mind to it, surprise surprise, was another kid from the 1960s, a man called Burt Rutan. And this is Burt here. Now, Burt Rutan is probably one of the few people that I know or have met that I would consider to be a genius. He has designed and built the most innovative and amazing aircraft, both for government and for private use over the past 35 years. He has a unique understanding and ability to use carbon composite materials in aviation. And Burt was pretty confident that this was $10 million that he would be able to win reasonably easily. He had other worries about the prize, but he thought he could put his mind to this. And interestingly, as far as Virgin were concerned, we were working on that GlobalFlyer project I talked about earlier on, and we became aware, as we were sitting in the factory with Burt looking at the GlobalFlyer, that there was a funny little vehicle under wraps in the corner of the hangar, and we persuaded Burt to tell us what it was. And he said, ‘Well,’ you know, ‘I’m competing for the X Prize, and I’ve got a pretty innovative way, I think, of getting to space and back.’ And the more we got to know about how he was going about it, the more excited we got, because it seemed to us that he had solved, in a particularly brilliant way, these huge issues about safety and commercial viability.
Now – it’s a strange slide to have up here. But the way that Burt went about thinking about this, and I think this is a really good lesson for all those involved in innovation, design and science, was that, you know, he was prepared to look back in history for great ideas, for ideas that were ahead of their time. And this applies not just to aviation. I put this slide in because it’s one that my boss, Will Whitehorn, always insists we use. His grandfather designed this strange little car back in 1927. And it was actually the first petrol-electric hybrid car. And it was way before its time. The battery technology wasn’t adequate. Petrol was incredibly cheap, you know, why did you want to mess around with batteries and electricity anyway, when you had this unlimited supply of fossil fuels. But it actually worked. It wasn’t, of course, until 70 years later that the commercial version came along, in an era when battery technology and technology generally was far advanced, and of course, you had an impending fuel crisis, which actually made the thing marketable and desirable.
The reason I say that is because there was a project Burt Rutan was working on during the 1960s called the X-15, which he had always been very attracted by. And this was a project which had to be abandoned in the end by NASA and the US Air Force, because it was, again, a bit ahead of its time. But the thing that Burt loved about it was that it got away from this idea of having to have enormous rockets that had huge explosions at ground level punching their way through the atmosphere. It actually was a space aircraft, a space plane, that wasn’t launched from the ground at all. It was launched from the air. So the X-15 used to go up on the bottom of a B-52 bomber. It was launched at high altitude and powered its way into space, and successfully on a number of occasions, and it sort of worked very well. The problem with it was, it was actually quite dangerous, particularly because of the weight of this space plane. It had to be made out of very heavy metals, because there was no alternative material at that time which would be strong enough and resilient enough to withstand the forces.
What Burt had at his disposal, of course, was carbon composite material, which changed all that. So the first thing, if you look at the lefthand side of the screen from where you are, is that we go for air launch, not ground launch. So we actually built two vehicles, a carrier aircraft, which we call WhiteKnight, and a spaceship, which we call SpaceShipTwo. And the carrier aircraft goes up to 50,000 feet, and it launches the aircraft at that level. Just that alone makes the technology thousands of times safer than launching from the ground. If everything goes well at that point, the pilots of the spaceship fire the rocket motor, and you accelerate very, very quickly. For those inside, that’s the big kick. You go from about 140 knots of airspeed to the speed of sound in less than eight seconds, and then you keep accelerating to two and a half thousand miles an hour, going straight upwards into space, powered by a very powerful, but a very safe hybrid rocket motor. A hybrid rocket motor, again, is a great idea from the past that has been developed for this vehicle. It consists of nitrous oxide, which is a benign gas, and rubber as the fuel. Those two elements are very stable in their own right. Even when you mix them they don’t do anything. But when you force the nitrous oxide through a hole in the rubber core and ignite it, you get a nice powerful rocket motor which is more than sufficient to get us up into space.
So, once you’re up into space, something really clever happens, and you heard Burt talk about that on the video. One of the really big issues about space travel is coming back into the Earth’s atmosphere, because those who have done physics will know that, basically, you come down at the speed that you went up, and when you hit the earth’s atmosphere you develop a lot of heat. And in the old days they used a capsule which was pretty much bomb-proof. It came down on a parachute, splashed down into the sea, you threw it away and built a new one. The Space Shuttle tried to get over it by flying into the earth’s atmosphere, which worked providing that you’re able to keep a perfect trajectory, which relies on sophisticated computer flight control systems. What Burt wanted to develop was a fool-proof system that didn’t rely on pilots or computer-controlled flight systems, and would also be reusable, could be used time after time. And for his inspiration, he took the humble shuttlecock, and for those that play badminton, you’ll know that if you throw a shuttlecock up into the air, regardless of which way it starts to come down, even if it’s upside down, immediately it starts to come down, it will turn itself always, it will right itself automatically, so that the ball of the shuttlecock is always facing downwards. And that’s just the law of physics.
The other great thing about a shuttlecock is that the feathers act as airbrakes, and so the rate of descent is controlled and slowed. Burt thought, if I could change the shape of my little space plane by rotating the wings through 90 degrees, so those wings become like the feathers of a shuttlecock, then it’s just possible that whatever angle I come into the Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft will automatically be turned so it comes down belly first, and that those inverted or rotated wings will act as giant airbrakes, and will slow the spacecraft down in the very high atmosphere so it never builds up any sort of dangerous heat, and the pilots have to do nothing. This is something which is going to be completely reliant on the laws of physics, not on computers which can go wrong or pilots who are fallible. And so he designed it. He put it into SpaceShipOne. He put SpaceShipOne into space, and it worked perfectly.
So with that, Virgin Galactic was born. Burt Rutan had done what only three of the world’s most powerful governments had done before, which was to put a man in space, and there was a huge opportunity. The SpaceShipOne now hangs in the Smithsonian Museum between the Spirit of St Louis and the Bell X-1, Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1, in pride of place, which shows just what an important achievement it was. Burt’s real concern at that point was that would be the end of the story, that he’d done something amazing, and that would be it, and it would still be just as hard for you or me to go to space. And so he was very keen to meet somebody that might be able to go to the next stage. So he needed the final part of the story, which was the entrepreneur. And so we came along. We believed that this technology was so different and so much better, had all the key ingredients needed to make commercial, safe space travel for ordinary people a possibility. We signed a licensing deal, and we started work on designing and building the next generation of vehicles, SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo.
One of the first things that we had to do, of course, being a business rather than just a charity or anything else, was to make sure that, even if we had the best technology, that it was going to work really well and be extremely safe, that somebody wanted to buy it. And there was no market for this, of course, at the time. There was no proof that anybody would be able to pay, or be willing to pay, very early in the project what we knew would be a realistic price to start this service off. We knew that we were going to have to spend about $350 million of our own money to get to commercial operations and the development programme, and we knew that we’d need to charge around $200,000 to start with for each of the first seats, although we’re very committed and will be able to bring that price down in time. So one of my first jobs was to go out and persuade the guys at Virgin who control the money that there were indeed people out there that wanted to do this. And we set up a small website, and we explained what we were going to do. We explained how much it was going to cost. We said the first seats were on sale if anybody was interested. They would need to put the full amount down, unfortunately. We wouldn’t be able to tell them exactly what the product looked like or when it was going to get delivered, or even, you know, if they would be eligible to fly.
But nevertheless, you know, we waited with bated breath, and we were just overwhelmed. We had tens of thousands of people sign onto that website, saying that this was a fantastic and important project, they would love to fly to space. Most of those people, of course, said that they would need to wait till the price came down. Fortunately, there were one or two people, and in fact quite a lot more than one or two people, who said that, ‘Actually I’m in the very fortunate position of doing this early, and I would love to reserve,’ you know, ‘one of the first seats.’ And this proof of market was so important for us. If we hadn’t had these people sign up early, we would not have pushed the button on the development programme. And I’m pleased to say that quite a few of those people came from Ireland. So we now have five future astronauts from Ireland, which is pretty dramatic per capita. And two of those are actually in the audience tonight. We have PJ King here in the front, and Bill Cullen sitting over to the side there. And Bill, I just wondered if you could perhaps just pop up on stage, and I can ask you why on earth you decided you wanted to do this.
Bill Cullen
Well, that’s easy. When Jackie said she met me 30 years ago, I was on another planet then, so it was no big surprise to her when I volunteered to go onto Virgin Galactic.
Stephen Attenborough
Good. Well, she said she wanted a one-way ticket for you, but we...
Bill Cullen
Ah, no, no, I have to tell you a bit more about that, you know the fee was $200,000, and you can’t get insurance for going into space, so Jackie got Richard in a headlock over in New York about eight months ago, and said to him, ‘We’re going to rearrange the deal.’ So she’s agreed with him that it’s $1 to go up, and $199,999 to bring him back. So we’ve had a shake hands with Richard on that one, haven’t we?
Stephen Attenborough
We have. Bill, just very briefly, tell us a little bit about, you know, why you did this, seriously, and, you know, what it is that you’re particularly looking forward to.
Bill Cullen
Well, I’m sure if I look out here upon everyone in the audience, they’ll all realise when we were little kids down here like this, going into space was something we all imagined about. And in my time, growing up in the 1940s, we’d a fellow called Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. How many people used to hear that on the wireless, on the wireless radio? Man, it was terrific. And I remember saying back at that time to my ma, ‘Ma, I’m going to go into space one of these days.’ She said, ‘Yeah, but you’ll have to match your granny and live to be a hundred.’ You know. So, thankfully it’s going to happen earlier than that. And the other thing that really, really impressed me was the time we saw the Sputniks going up. We saw all the things happening.
But when I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Stanley Kubrick, and that really, really charged my batteries, because I saw that going into space was probably the nearest thing you can get to being spiritual, it’s ephemeral, it’s holistic, and it’s bringing you closer to the spirits that have left this world before us. And that’s the main reason why I’m going into space, because I think it’s going to do something extraordinary for all of us who go up there. And I don’t know whether, didn’t Stephen say that, I was the first person in the world to sign a contract to go into space with Virgin, and I was also the first person in the world to pay the $200,000. So, on that note, I think I can rely upon the fact that, you know, when these spacecrafts start going up in the next 15 months?
Stephen Attenborough
Yeah.
Bill Cullen
18 months? I’ll be certainly looking forward to be out there at the helm, and my objective is to raise four or five million for the Irish Youth Foundation charity. That’s my whole reason now for trying to make this happen as soon as possible.
Stephen Attenborough
Fantastic. Thanks very much, Bill.
Bill Cullen
And I do want to say that I see myself somewhere in that picture. It’s been a tremendous experience just so far, and Stephen here is one of the quiet backroom heroes, with Burt Rutan and Richard all out front. But I’ve great respect for him and what he’s doing, and going to make it bring in as early as possible. Thank you.
Stephen Attenborough
Thank you. Thanks. What I’m looking forward to when Bill flies is to be sitting in the mission control room, and at the point the pilots light the rocket motor, I’m going to say, ‘Bill, you’re fired.’ Anyway, moving on quickly. That was good.
So what I’d like now to tell you a little bit about is the customer experience, you know, what Bill and others want from the trip and what it’s going to be like. You’ve seen pretty much what the ride’s going to be like. The profile of the trip is exactly the same as Brian Binnie did in SpaceShipOne. But of course it’s a much bigger cabin. You’ve got six people rather than, well, six passengers, two pilots, rather than just the one pilot. It’s going to be sort of executive jet size. And the experience, I think, that most people are really looking forward to, obviously, is those few minutes when you’re in space. It’s absolutely silent. There’s no fans, there’s no machinery working in the spaceship at that point. Very unusual for a manned spacecraft, actually. And so you will genuinely experience the silence of space. And after that incredible rocket ride, you know, where you’re just being catapulted up into the black sky, as soon as the rocket motor is turned off, you have an incredible contrast, because you’re instantly weightless.
Now, Bill and PJ and our other customers that we asked very early on all told us that zero gravity was something that they wanted to experience. But zero gravity can only be experienced, really, if you’re not in your seat. There’s no point being in zero gravity with a seatbelt on in a small cabin. And so, you know, we knew straight away that we needed to have a cabin that was big enough, and a vehicle that was capable of having people floating around inside. So immediately you’re in zero gravity, our passengers, our customers, will be able to push away from their seats and have that remarkable experience of floating around where there’s no up, there’s no down, there’s nothing constraining any sort of movement.
And on top of the silence and the zero gravity, they’re going to get the views. And if you read the accounts of some of the astronauts that have been up in the last 45 years or so, the one thing that is the life-changing experience for them all is just that view back on Mother Earth. And I don’t know what happens, because I haven’t done it myself yet, but there is definitely a flick, a switch is flicked in the brain, and you get a completely different perception of our home, our planet, the nature of where we come from and where we live. And that, I think, is going to be the remarkable experience, and Brian Binnie had that experience. He’s a big, tough test pilot. Most of the astronauts are, you know, pretty tough guys as well. They never expected to have that experience. They never expected to react in that way. But just about all of them did. Many of them came back as confirmed environmentalists, because when you see how narrow that ribbon of atmosphere is which is completely responsible for life on earth, you do recognise that there is a bit of an imperative to, you know, to protect what we’ve got, because there’s nothing else out there in space, at least that we know of, that will offer an alternative home just yet.
This, incidentally, is where we’re going to be operating from. It’s in New Mexico. It’s called Spaceport America. The State of New Mexico are building this for us at a cost of $250 million. New Mexico is a great place for us to be. It’s got good weather. It’s got closed airspace. And it’s going to be landmark architecture. The building itself is going to be completely self-sufficient in its energy requirements, and that’s where PJ, Bill, and all our other first astronauts will be taking their flights from.
Now, where are we in the project? Well, on July the 28th this year, we rolled out the first bit of real kit, which was a great relief to all of us, who have been working there for some time. There was something going on behind closed doors. And great relief, I think, to our customers as well. So this is the carrier aircraft. It’s the world’s largest all-carbon composite aircraft. It’s the world’s most fuel-efficient aircraft. It has a unique, heavy-lift, high-altitude capability. And that is the aircraft which will be taking to the skies in the next few weeks. We’ll be kicking off the test flight programme.
Safety is the North Star of this project. We can’t tell any of these guys when they’re going to be flying exactly, because we won’t fly anybody until we’re absolutely satisfied that the test flight programme has been completed, that these vehicles have been tested to the absolute limits of their capabilities, and that we have an operation which is going to carry them in the highest levels of safety that we are possibly able to achieve. And those levels of safety need to be broadly equivalent to private aviation today. At the moment, if you go up on a government rocket, either from the US or the USSR, if you look at the statistics over the last 45-50 years, you’ve got about a one in 90 chance of coming back, you know, and we have to change that dramatically before we take anybody into space ourselves. But these vehicles are capable of doing that, because they’re better by design.
This is SpaceShipTwo a few months ago, taking shape in, again, the hangars of Mojave. It’s all carbon composite, again. And, as you can see, we haven’t forgotten to put big windows in, because that would’ve been a fundamental mistake. And so, the windows that we have in the side and the top of this spacecraft are about twice the size that you get in a commercial airliner, and that, of course, is to make sure that all those passengers in that zero gravity time are able to get the views of the 1,000 km in any direction of the earth beneath them. This is Burt Rutan, just sitting in the spaceship, just accentuating the fact, because he’s a very tall guy, that there’s plenty of room in here. And in fact this spaceship will be the largest, when you look at the room per person inside, that’s ever been built. Manned spaceships that have been built by government agencies in the past tend to be very cramped and very small, because customer experience was never at the top of their priorities.
So we’re on track, you know. It’s an incredible project to be working for. It’s one that’s very high-risk. It’s very expensive. It may be a slightly crazy thing to do, but we are very confident now that we’re on track, particularly as we start the test flight programme with the new vehicles, to be able to offer this trip of a lifetime in really quite short measure. My best estimate, and we’re generally against giving estimates of dates, so don’t hold me to it, is that we’re probably at least two-thirds of the way through the project, and we’ve been going for four years now. So we think within the next two years or so, we should be at a stage where we can kick off the commercial operations. But if test flights take longer than that, then so be it.
And just to finish with, I just want to make a couple of points about where this project may lead us. Because this is about transforming space access. It’s about making space access far more available, far more safe, and far cheaper. And we’re going to start with space tours. You know, that’s our first available market. It’s enabled us to carry out the development project. And hopefully, after suborbital, we’ll be able to develop vehicles which will take people into orbit. So the idea of space hotels and a fortnight in space for your holiday becomes a reality.
But it doesn’t stop there. And I think, actually, the next business we’ll launch is probably Virgin Galactic Science Services. Now, there is a huge demand out there from universities, from scientific institutions, from commercial companies, to get time in microgravity, also to do atmospheric sampling, to do astronomy, to do earth observation, with humans on board. Now, I know one of the purposes of Science Week is to really try and re-inspire young people to opt for science and engineering as a career. And it’s a national priority, you know, not just here but in the UK and the States and elsewhere. And these spaceships, for example, will allow scientists to accompany their experiments into space. And that’s something that’s been very difficult to achieve in the past because of the scarcity of manned space flights. And so we’re already seeing companies starting to put in proposals to us, including NASA actually, to quote for them and to put forward a plan to be able to offer SpaceShipTwo with scientific experiments on board, and with scientists on board as well. And what better inspiration, I think, could there be for young people considering a career in science to know that they’ll probably get a free trip as an astronaut as well?
So that, I think, will be the next business, and in fact that’s already started. The business after that, I suspect, will be Virgin Galactic Cargo, because this system that we have also has the potential of being developed into an unmanned reusable small satellite launch vehicle, and the potential in that business, again, is huge, because we can reduce the costs by maybe a factor of six or seven. We can up the availability almost without limit. We can launch anywhere in the world that customers want to launch from, and we can launch at any time they want to launch. And the small satellite market at the moment, the one thing that’s holding it back is the availability and the cost of launch. Now, a lot of the challenges that we face down here on Earth in the next 20 or 30 years can be partially solved, we believe, by making better use of space. For example, if you’re able to launch clusters of small satellites that will put themselves together in space to form a solar power station, which is quite possible and plausible, put it into an orbit that’s in constant sunlight, collect that solar energy and use microwave technology to beam it back down to earth, you’ve suddenly got a potentially fantastic source of free and clean energy. Those sort of ideas are being limited at the moment by the cost and availability of launch and space access. And our system and others that will follow it, we believe, could transform that.
And then finally, probably looking a little bit into the future, but nevertheless a very attractive one for anybody that does a lot of travel, is that we think that probably the future of commercial air travel is not supersonic, but it’s actually suborbital. And so, the idea of taking off from London, actually going outside the Earth’s atmosphere to do most of the trip, coming back into the Earth’s atmosphere somewhere near Australia, landing on the runway in Sydney and probably taking a couple of hours to do that trip is, I think, pretty phenomenal.
And, you know, we won’t get there unless we do this first step first, so we – if we can prove that you can take ordinary people to space day after day after day in their thousands, and that you can bring them back again safely, and you can make money from it, then we think we’ll have a wall of private sector money coming into this industry which will make this sort of innovation and the future of space travel for the benefit of mankind a real possibility. And it could happen very quickly. You need only look at other industries that have been stuck in government control, the mobile telephone industry is a good one. You know, that’s where it started, that’s where it was first used, and there was no real innovation. That’s why mobile phones were the size of this lectern to start with, and it was only once the private sector got involved, and they believed that there was a big market out there and they could make money, that you saw incredibly rapid innovation, and you continue to see that today.
So that’s where I’d like to stop, really. And, you know, I hope it’s answered some of your questions about Virgin Galactic, and hopefully we now have some time for a few questions if there are any. Thank you very much.
Stephen Attenborough
This had to be a tourist experience like any other tourist experience, that you could turn up really quite close to the flight, you know, with an average health and fitness, without any special experience, and pretty much sort of climb on, take the trip, and then go off back to work again. And one of the really interesting things that we’ve done in the last couple of years is to build some data about the effect of G-forces on the body. Now, the only data that really existed in the world before we put some new data together, was that collected from the people that tended to pull high Gs, and those people, you know, are fighter jet pilots, they’re professional astronauts and others that tend to be pretty young, mostly male, and at the peak of physical fitness. Our customer base, with all due respect to the two that are here today, are pretty much like that, you know, so – but no, the average age of our customers that have signed, I’ve heard, is 55. We have 300 of them now, by the way, from 40 countries around the world.
And they have, you know, a very, sort of, you know, range of health conditions, fitness conditions, and so we took the first 100, including Bill and PJ here, and we invited them on a brief trip to Philadelphia, and then we put them through a pretty intense experience in a centrifuge, having done some medical work beforehand. And so, the centrifuge in Philadelphia is actually able to replicate exactly the flight profile that will be experienced in SpaceShipTwo. And so, you pull about three and a half Gs on the way up. You actually peak at six Gs on the way down. And the experience there has been that, there have only been two people in that first 100 who we were unable to put on the centrifuge. And so, we are very, very optimistic, providing that you’re in, you know, reasonable shape, there will be no problem in taking this trip at all. You know. The human body is very robust. The oldest person who’s done this centrifuge training is an 88-year-old man from the UK. And, you know, he smiled.
Liz Bonnin
Sounds promising. Okay. I’d love to open up questions for the audience. I’m sure there are going to be loads. If you don’t mind hanging on for the microphone to be placed into your hand before asking the questions so that everybody can hear, that’d be great.
Question
What do you think of the Orion project, you know, NASA’s return to ballistic rockets? Is the Orion project a step back?
Stephen Attenborough
Sorry, just the first Question
The NASA Orion project. What do you think of it? Is it just a step back to ballistic rockets, and a step back in time?
Stephen Attenborough
Well, it sort of would appear to be, wouldn’t it? You know. The United States are in a very strange position at the moment as far as manned space travel is concerned. The Shuttle, I think, was probably, with hindsight, a misconceived design, you know, they tried to combine payload with people, which ended up in a very big and a very complex vehicle. And the Space Shuttle is retiring, due to retire in 2010. The new vehicle you refer to is not due to come on-stream, I think, till 2016, maybe. And so there’s going to be a gap, it’s almost unimaginable, really, for the United States, where they’ll have no way of getting people into space, so they’ll be using the Russians for that period. And then, the vehicle that’s planned, I think, is better in one sense, in that it’s separating payload from people, but as you say, it’s using a very traditional design. So, you know, it maybe is sad that they’re not, sort of, being a little bit more adventurous or a bit more innovative in the way that they do this job. But, you know, I think in the meantime the private sector is going to have a lot of influence on, you know, the way the government astronauts get to space. I fully expect NASA to be a very early client of Virgin Galactic. You know. It may be for scientific research to begin with, but it also may be for astronaut training at some stage.
Question
Richard, thank you for a brilliant presentation, really fascinating, really interesting. A question I have, I’ve always wondered is, how long would the client be up there for in suborbital? I’ve heard six minutes, and would that be enough?
Stephen Attenborough
Well, it’s actually more like five minutes than six minutes, and, you know, it depends what you mean by enough. You know. I mean, it would clearly be great to offer, you know, hours or days, you know. We will be able to do that providing we get this first stage right. You’re landed with science, unfortunately. You know. In a suborbital flight, you know, the way you get more weightlessness at the top of the parabola, you know, because you’re basically going up, over the top, and back down again, the way that you get more weightlessness time is to go higher, you know, and in order to go higher you’ve got to go faster, and if you go faster you’re going to pull more Gs. And if you pull more Gs, you’re going to limit the number of people that are going to be able to take the flight. So you have to find a happy medium. If you sit here and look at your watch for five minutes in silence, you know, it’s quite a long time. It is, you know, in our view, and certainly in Brian Binnie’s view, the test pilot, you know, it is a wonderful experience. I think people will come back absolutely overawed by it, and probably wanting to go for longer next time.
But, you know, I’ve never had any doubt, having spent quite a long time with those test pilots, that this is not going to disappoint. You know. I think the intensity of the experience from start to finish is going to exceed expectations.
Liz Bonnin
What about the cost, even? What can you envisage in 10, 20 years, because £200,000...?
Stephen Attenborough
$200,000.
Liz Bonnin
Dollars, sorry.
Stephen Attenborough
You know. Which used to be good, but...
Liz Bonnin
But, you know, for, sort of, the man in the street who’s thinking, ‘Well, that’s not going to be attainable for me,’ what’s the potential for the price to go down?
Stephen Attenborough
The potential is great for the price to go down, you know, and you have to look at the early days of aviation, again, is a really good sort of example of how things can happen. I mean, Burt Rutan always talks about, I think it was his grandfather, must be his father, probably his grandfather, who as a very small child, you know, he was come from a very ordinary family, you know, not wealthy by any means, used to be taken to those early airfields to see the Ford Trimotors take off to do those very first small commercial trips across the US. And he used to look from the other side of the fence and see people in fur coats getting onto that, you know, onto that plane. And, you know, he knew, at least in his own mind, he knew that he would never, ever be able to do that. You know. And, of course, that patently obviously wasn’t the case. But if it hadn’t been for those first people who were able to be in the position of paying the price that it took, you know, to develop and to run those early aircraft, then, you know, we wouldn’t have the industry we have today.
So, I mean, I think history is on our side, and again it will depend on us just getting this first stage really right. And if we do that, then I think technology will move forward quickly. As soon as we’ve paid off our development costs, we’ll be able to bring prices down, and we will do that. But, you know, how far and how fast we will wait and see.
Question
I’m just wondering, you mentioned a few minutes ago there about the capability of the human body to handle G-forces, particularly in short-term flights like two hours or so. In future, let’s say, when you begin to consider the actual possibility of long-term space tourism, and knowing that a lot of astronauts going up even for a week or so, the first three days they get a kind of a space sickness, and quite often coming back with a kind of form of osteoporosis, loss of carbon to their skeleton. Are you going to be working on any sort of ways of compensating for that, particularly in longer journeys?
Stephen Attenborough
We’re not working on that, because we have to be very focused on what we’re doing at the moment, which is the suborbital trips. The suborbital trips, you don’t have any issues with that sort of thing, because you’re just not up there long enough, which, you know, it may be a disadvantage for the experience, but it’s certainly an advantage from sort of a health and fitness point of view. So, you know, the issues that we will have, I think, with health will be, you know, some people get motion sickness, you know, and, you know, we will need to deal with that and cope with that in a way, I think, which will not be too difficult, because we have a period, two or three days, where we’re going to be training people and preparing them for the trip. We’re able to control diet. There are some very effective drugs on the market now. And also, if you’re very careful about the way that you move around, particularly as you push away from your seat in zero gravity, you know, these things can be controlled so that you ought to have a virtually zero incidence of that sort of sickness.
You’re right, you know, if you’re going to be putting people in zero gravity, particularly people that are not super-fit, for any length of time, then it presents its challenges. But they’re not necessarily challenges that we can’t overcome. But, you know, it wouldn’t be right for us to be focusing on those particular challenges right at the moment, because we have other ones that we need to overcome first of all.
Question
You know the way, if a plane is flying over Irish airspace, we kind of own that airspace, and if you’re, say, a Russian plane flying over Cuba a couple of decades ago, you know, near America, you could be in trouble, because that’s American airspace. You’re a UK company operating from New Mexico. Has there been any discussion about, I suppose, ownership of the space that you’re going into?
Stephen Attenborough
Well, we’re actually going to be a US company, working from the US, but we’re a sort of Britishowned group, which I think is quite nice, you know, that the Brits will get there first. The US administration are absolutely behind this project, NASA are absolutely behind this project. And it’s a very good question, but it’s quite simple, again, for suborbital trips because we’re just going to be blasting up, straight up into a very narrow little bit of, through a very narrow bit of airspace into the same bit of space every time and coming straight back down. So, we’re never going to be over anything other than, you know, a small patch of New Mexico to start with, you know, unless things go badly wrong. And there’s legislation which has been passed in the US two or three years ago, which was deliberately put into place to facilitate the start of commercial manned space travel, so it’s given us a liability framework, and it’s enabled us to go through a licensing process with the Federal Aviation Administration. And so they really sort of made clear, you know, what we need to do in order to operate within the US as a commercial space line.
This is also a system which can travel, I mean, that aircraft you saw, the WhiteKnightTwo, has a range of about two and a half thousand nautical miles. So the lovely thing about it is that we can actually take the system to anywhere in the world, and providing, again, as you say, you have the right regulatory environment, you have the right sort of surroundings on the ground, which typically are deserts or empty areas, that you have the right weather conditions, then this is something we can fly anywhere. And so, you know, one of the things we plan to do in the future, as soon as we get the export licences and the businesses bedded down, is to be able to take the system to various parts of the world for maybe fairly short periods of time each year, and be able to run services from, you know, whether it’s the north of Sweden or somewhere in the Middle East or the Pacific, so you’re able to attract a local population. But also, for those that want to go again, you can get a different view. You know, so if your first flight was in the US and you were looking down at the Pacific coast, I think it’d be pretty attractive to go again from Kiruna in the north of Sweden and look at the North Pole, you know, particularly if you can fly through the Aurora Borealis at the same time.
Liz Bonnin
Which is a possibility, right, you’re discussing that very fact. Excellent. Another question over here.
Question
How long before you take the first group of space tourists to the Moon?
Stephen Attenborough
If you asked Richard Branson that question, he’d be hopelessly optimistic about it and say that, you know, well, he may not be hopelessly optimistic, but he would say he’d love to stand on the Moon before he died, and maybe he will. You know. Again, I don’t know the answer to that question, clearly, but what I do know, as I said right at the end of the presentation, looking at other industries, is that you can have industries which just go into this terrible period of stagnation, you know, for particular reasons, largely because they tend to be in government control. And when they come out of that environment, you can see incredibly rapid innovation. And so, you know, sitting here today thinking about, you know, you and I stepping on the Moon, it sounds a little crazy to me, it probably sounds a little crazy to you. But again, if we can get ordinary people up into space on a very regular basis and prove that it can be done, and we can make money from it as a commercial entity, then, you know, I mean, the technology is sort of there. I mean, we did it in 1969. And so, it ought to be more than possible to do it again.
Question
So after this, would there be a project for a space elevator?
Liz Bonnin
A space elevator? I love it.
Stephen Attenborough
Yeah. There are probably people in this room that can answer that question better than I can. I think the space elevator idea, you know, and somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I think from a conceptual perspective is something which works. You know, you’re effectively putting an enormous mast attached to the Earth. As the Earth spins, it basically sort of flings the thing out into space, and you could, you know, you could actually transfer people or payload or both, you know, sort of straight up the mast. The problem is what you make the mast out of. And it’s a carbon fibre derivative that they’re looking at at the moment. Somebody else interrupt me if you know more about it than I do, but, you know – PJ.
PJ King, Virgin Galactic Founders’ Club
There’s been quite a bit of work on that, and what reignited interest in it, it’s actually an idea that goes back to the beginning of the 19th century. And the fundamental problem with it, is to build anything that tall requires material with a strength way in excess of anything we’ve had. However, interestingly enough, carbon nano-tubes, on an individual basis, now have the tensile strength to actually do something like that. And I was at an interesting lecture a few years back, where the problem they’re having is, when you take those microscopic pieces of carbon fibre and you basically spin them up into something like a steel cable, they’re struggling to make that work. So I would say, never say never. Remember, though, you would need to build it, not just to 100 km. Your drop-off point out there would have to be in geostationary orbit. It’s 36,000 km out. And you would need a counterweight on the other side of that, probably as far away again. So it is a monstrous engineering task, but it’s a fantastic idea.
Liz Bonnin
Thanks very much, PJ. Is that why you’re sticking with Virgin Galactic for the moment, PJ?
PJ King
Yeah. I’d go on that one too, though.
Liz Bonnin
I’m sure you would. Okay, we have a question up here.
Question
Yeah, hi, Stephen, just a quick question. How long do you think before, what was it, space hotels come into wide scale commercial use?
Stephen Attenborough
You know, I think that could be quite quick, actually. You know. I mean, there is at least one very real space hotel project which is being funded by another billionaire, which has a prototype flying in space at the moment, actually, using inflatable structures. You know, it’s a real leap of faith as far as he’s concerned, because, you know, he’s building the hotels before there’s any transport to get there. But that’s the way it should be. And so, again, I come back to my same old point, you know, if we can get suborbital right first, then I think orbital could follow quite quickly. It comes with some challenges, as the gentleman down here explained. But I think the structures will be up there, or at least available to be put up there, in the very near future.
Question
Just three quick questions. Do you expect that you’ll be operating a fleet of aircraft, or just an individual, or space planes I should say, or just, well, one pair? Secondly, what’s the turnaround time of a single space plane going to be? And the last one, do you envisage any problems with passengers getting back in their seats, seeing as you allow them out?
Stephen Attenborough
Yeah. Let me do that last one first, because –
Liz Bonnin
It’s more fun.
Stephen Attenborough
- it’s more fun. You know, it’s a really good question, and one of the things that I always look at, I fly a lot now, and I generally try and fly on Virgin Atlantic, and if I’m lucky I get an upgrade to the front cabin. And, you know, if you ask any of the cabin crew on that airline, you know, who are the worst people at getting back in their seats, you know, when the seatbelt light comes on, they’ll always say it’s the upper class passengers, because they sort of feel they’ve paid a lot for this flight and nobody’s going to tell them when they’re going to sit down. You know, and there’s almost sort of a race to see who can be the last standing before you land. And so, you know, we do have to think about that. The great advantage in the spaceship is that, you know, they will be forced to get back down on the floor, because, you know, when you go from zero gravity to 1G, you know, there’s only one way that you go. And when that’s followed by 6G, you’re very definitely on the floor.
What we have to do, actually, on the way down, the spacecraft comes down belly first, and because you do peak at 6G with the deceleration, the most comfortable way to go through that is actually by having the Gs coming from front to back. So we’re going to get people lying down. They’ll be prone for that part of the journey. And our current thinking is, rather than having seats that recline, so each passenger has in that 23 seconds between zero and 1G, has to find their own seat, sort of sit down in it, lie down in it, it’s much better actually to have the seats folded away completely, and get them just to lie on the floor, because, you know, you’re going to be there anyway. If you have a reclining seat, it’s one more thing to go wrong, because if it doesn’t recline and you’re sitting up taking 6Gs, it’s going to hurt a little bit. So, you know, Burt always says the most reliable bit of equipment in any aircraft or spacecraft is the bit you don’t put in. So, you know, I think the floor is a good option.
Liz Bonnin
Less is more. Then there was a question about, are you going to have a fleet?
Stephen Attenborough
Yeah, we’re ordering five spaceships and three aircraft to start with, I mean, you know, providing things go well. I mean, we’ll start the operation with one of each. The turnaround time is, the aircraft can fly four times a day, and the spacecraft twice. But we won’t start with anything like that frequency, you know. We’re going to be doing one flight a week to start with, because the operation needs to bed down. And we know from running airlines that you need to build up that ingrained culture of safety in the people that are doing the turnaround and managing the ground facilities. And the best way to get it right is just to take it slowly.
Liz Bonnin
And, I’m sorry, your second question? Was that covered? Okay. Lovely, thank you. Okay, we’ve a gentleman up there as well. Go ahead.
Question
Hi. Thank you. Each project of this magnitude has its own problems, and you obviously overcome them within a decade. I was just wondering, in the detail, what was the biggest challenge that you had to overcome, whether it be in the material or the engine? What was the biggest challenge?
Stephen Attenborough
Yeah. I mean, the biggest challenge for Virgin, I suppose, actually, I mean, if we leave aside scale composites and Burt Rutan who are actually building this, I mean, they obviously had their own technical challenges. But if we just look at this from a business point of view, you know, this is not a typical, or really the way we would’ve chosen to do this, because, you know, we have a lot of experience as an operator, so we can be the Virgin Atlantic of space quite easily. We’ve got a lot of experience there. But this project, we’re having to be the operator, but we’re also having to be the Boeing or the Airbus, and we’re also having to be, you know, the guys that are actually building the prototype of the commercial vehicles and testing it. So, you know, we’re paying for everything, and it is being solely funded by Virgin. So, you know, this is a more risky project, or at least we’re in it in a way which we had no alternative, because you wouldn’t really have been able, certainly in the early days, to attract external investment, which we would do in most businesses.
So we had to take on the whole thing. So that really increases the risk for us, and it’s a significant funding requirement. You know. And so, coming into, you know, what appears to be the mother of all recessions, you know, that is potentially an issue. But, you know, we’re very determined to do this, and we’re a long way down the road. And actually, we are at a stage now, because we’ve got the vehicles built and they’re very shortly going to start test flying, where if we wanted to attract some external investment, I think we probably could. And we may well do that, actually, just to lessen that risk.
As far as technically, which is probably where your question was, you know, SpaceShipOne was a project which was really fairly straightforward, I suppose, with hindsight, for Burt and his team. I mean, they didn’t need to radically change anything in the initial design. Clearly, as they went through the process of flight testing, you know, they made small alterations, and they learned a lot from that prototype which is now being built into the commercial application. I’m just trying to think if there’s anything that comes, sort of, more to mind. But I suppose the big difference between the SpaceShipOne project and the SpaceShipTwo project was that SpaceShipOne was designed as a prototype. It was designed to win the X Prize, which only meant it needed to go to space twice. And in fact it went three times in 2004.
SpaceShipTwo, the big issue is that we’ve got to get it to a standard of safety, you know, which means that it can fly for maybe five or 10 years with tens of thousands of passengers. And so it needs to be built and tested to a completely different standard. And that’s quite a challenge.
Liz Bonnin
Okay, we have one last question, with the gentleman in the front.
Question
Okay, to summarise, we all know about the Russians trying to capitalise on their space race achievements, so they’re trying to have commercial flights as well, but it’s all run by the national agency. But do you know about any other privately-owned companies in the world trying to do the same, like, trying to compete with you at this stage?
Stephen Attenborough
I know of some, but I wouldn’t say that we would regard them, really, as meaningful competition. And most of them, well I think all of them really, are what I would call paper designs. They’re still at the concept stage. Nobody has flown anything else, even as a prototype. I would say that any competition that is out there is at least five years behind at the moment, unless somebody’s doing something very secret somewhere that we don’t know about. And the big problem is funding, actually, you know, because I think that SpaceShipOne and the design for SpaceShipTwo does the suborbital job so well, and we have made such a, you know, a positive and meaningful, you know, sort of progress in this project, that anybody looking at investing money in the sector, you know, I think, would have to be pretty brave to back alternative technology which, certainly the things that I’ve seen, doesn’t do the job half as well. I mean, most people are still thinking about ground-based rocket technology, you know, as we discussed at some length, you know, it has big disadvantages over air launch.
Liz Bonnin
Okay. Well, I’m afraid we are out of time now. Sorry. But that was thoroughly enjoyable. Thank you so much. Stephen Attenborough, everybody.
Stephen Attenborough
Thank you.
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