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.
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