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.
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