In February 2007 I traveled to Cape Canaveral to the NASA Space Center to attend an event at which Virgin Galactic named 45 Virtuoso travel agents Accredited Space Agents, the first travel agents in America authorized to sell tickets for the suborbital space rides that were about to be offered by Virgin Galactic.
The agents had been selected from 125 applicants within the Virtuoso consortium. They had completed a two-day training course to become qualified to sell the suborbital flights and they were like starry-eyed children, brimming with excitement. Being at the NASA Space Center surrounded by exhibits from the space program heightened the thrill.
The accreditation dinner was held under the Saturn rocket that had been built for Apollo 19 before the Apollo program was discontinued.
"It's the most momentous thing to happen in travel," said one of the new Space Agents. "It's going to show people perspective. All the trivialities will fall by the wayside."
"It's the single most exciting thing I've seen in my 31 years in this business," said another.
"It makes me feel giddy and young, this adventure ... it's beyond words," said a third.
Rocket Love
Virgin Galactic showed lavish films with vivid graphics about how the new technology worked. The innovative Virgin technology brought more than just the thrill of hurtling through the sky to the edge of space, which would have been enough. It also had enormous practical applications. By shooting into space, you could hop from Los Angeles to Sydney in about four hours.
The technology was elegant. It involved two separate aircraft. First was the WhiteKnightTwo, which flew to a height of 50,000 feet, where you can clearly see the curvature of the earth. At that point WhiteKnightTwo dropped the actual spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, which would drop into freefall till the two aircraft cleared each other, then SpaceShipTwo's engine would ignite and shoot the craft into space carrying six passengers and two pilots.
Carolyn Wincer, Virgin Galactic's head of astronaut sales and the training leader, said the ship would scream into near space literally "faster than a speeding bullet."
Passengers would be pinned to their seats by G forces for a minute and a half while SpaceShipTwo soared beyond the 62-mile threshold of space. For four minutes beyond the Earth's atmosphere, passengers would be weightless.
"It flies from 50,000 feet to 360,000 feet, 70 miles," Wincer told the agents. "The sky changes from blue to black. The pilot turns off the engine to instant silence and weightlessness. On one side, the view is black. On the other is a 10,000-mile view in any direction on Earth. You'll be in a spacious cabin with large windows. You continue to climb for a while after the engine is turned off. Then the earth pulls you back."
For about four minutes beyond the Earth's atmosphere, passengers experience weightlessness.
SpaceShipTwo was designed like a badminton shuttlecock, so that it would always come down right side up and glide to a soft landing.
Revised Projections
When Branson announced the project in 2004, he said the flights would start in 2007. In early 2007 the spacecraft were in construction with plans for testing that fall in preparation for commercial launches that we were told would start as soon as 2008.
Although other companies such as Rocketplane and Benson Space were saying they may beat Virgin to the first launch, Virgin was emphatic that there would be no space race. Virgin would wait until the technology was ready. The fact that the U.S. government was focused solely on beating the Soviets to the moon, said Wincer, caused them to make bad decisions.
According to Wincer, "They ditched good technology to go for the quickest solutions. They had accidents. We saw what happened when there was a space race."
The technology that NASA used was, according to Wincer, "like flying a 747 to London and then throwing it away after one use." No private business could function with that kind of cost.
Virgin's technology, on the other hand, designed by Burt Rutan, was extremely simple, with few moving parts, and therefore few things that could go wrong. It was "almost fail safe," according to Virgin Galactic COO Alex Tai.
The suborbital flights were being sold for $200,000, with a deposit of $50,000 to $150,000. In May 2013, the price was raised to $250,000.
Even before the accreditation of the Space Agents in 2007, Jack Ezon, of New York's Ovation Travel, had already sold the very first Virgin Galactic ticket in America. It was purchased on the night before New Year's Eve by a hedge fund manager in his early 30 who had just received an $8 million bonus.
But after an accident in 2007 when a fuel tank for SpaceShipTwo exploded and killed three employees, the first purchaser of a Virgin Galactic ticket asked for his money back. Ezon has sold four of the Virgin Galactic flights so far. Two of the customers have since backed out.
Early this year, Virgin Galactic was saying it would begin commercial flights later this year. Then came the Oct. 31 crash of SpaceShipTwo on the Mojave Desert in California, the death of a pilot, and everything fell into question again.
Since the Oct. 31 accident, Branson has said he wants to continue his quest to provide commercial space travel. But first, he said, Virgin would have to figure out what happened, and then try to figure out ways to overcome it.
Branson put his earlier plans to fly Virgin Galactic himself in February 2015 on hold.
Commercial Space Travel's First Successes
The only company that has actually provided space travel on a commercial basis so far is Space Adventures, formed in 1999. It's a private company but it has provided its commercial space travel by piggybacking on government agencies. Through a partnership with the Russian Space Agency, the company has offered private citizens the opportunity to participate in trips to the joint U.S.-Russian space station using the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Space Adventures' first customer was Dennis Tito, who paid $1 million to become the first private citizen launched into space on April 28, 2001. The company has sent six other private citizens to the space station since. For years Space Adventures has been boldly proclaiming that it will offer a commercial trip around the moon set to take place in 2018. It seemed a long time away when it was first announced. Now it's only four years away.
The Testing of a Cultural Icon
Richard Branson established himself as a culture hero, the entrepreneur who defied all boundaries, who went up against all the established powers and triumphed, accomplishing unprecedented things. He was going to take over space travel and succeed where no one had dared to go before. The privatization of space travel would be the triumph of not only space travel, but the ultimate triumph of privatization itself.
Branson had privatized the British rail system, with debatable results, but his stance had always been that the private entrepreneur could succeed where governments and large business establishments of the past had failed. It was hoped that he would take on space exploration, which had been largely abandoned by the U.S. government after the Apollo missions, and succeed where others had dropped the ball.
Virgin Galactic had started with a $100 million investment from the Virgin Group. It was augmented in 2010 when the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, Aabar Investments group, acquired a 31.8 percent stake in Virgin Galactic for $280 million. In 2011 Aaabar invested a further $100 million. The state government of New Mexico invested $200 million in building the spaceport for the project.
These are impressive numbers to the man on the street. But NASA had $20 billion a year to play around with from 1958 to 1983. Space exploration ain't cheap.
Now in early November 2014 after the crash of SpaceShipTwo, a humbled Richard Branson is deferring to the National Transportation Safety Board, an entity of the federal government, to investigate the crash and figure out what happened.
"My own estimate is it's going to take nothing like 12 months," Branson said in a video statement. "The NTSB has given a strong indication as to what they think caused the crash and I think they are going to be able to ascertain - I may be mistaken and it's up to them to say - what caused the crash relatively quickly. We will then be able to see whether there's anything we have to do to address it to make 100 percent sure it doesn't happen again. And then we can move forward."
Standing back and letting the government take over in the cleaning up of the mess is out of character with the Branson who was going to succeed boldly where governments had failed. Now the question is, when looking back on this in the future, will this just be seen as a setback that was overcome as part of the struggle to achieve the great objective? Or has this taken some of the wind out of Virgin Galactic's sails?
We shall see after the NTSB hands down its conclusions.
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