Drive north-east out of Los Angeles, and when the suburban sprawl finally gives out, the terrain looks more and more unearthly – parched scrub, lunar ridges and vast cloudless skies. This is the Mojave desert, offering few attractions to the casual visitor but the perfect environment in which to test aircraft.
It’s in these barren parts that the Edwards air force base is located, where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier for the first time, and where the test pilots celebrated in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff proved their mettle before going on to become America’s first astronauts. And it was here, at the Mojave Air and Space Port, that Virgin Galactic’s VSS Enterprise took off on its fourth powered test flight on 31 October 2014. At that point, 18 months ago, Richard Branson’s vision of sending members of the public into space seemed to be on the edge of realisation.
Since the discontinuation of the space shuttle programme in 2011, Nasa has largely given up on sending people into space. And while there is plenty of interest in unmanned expeditions, like the New Horizons probe that sent dramatic pictures back from Pluto last year, what has always fired the public imagination is the human component.
If its absence has left a void in human experience, Branson is one of several entrepreneurs who also see it as a gap in a new market. His was the first operation dedicated to civilian space travel but he’s recently been joined by two others. Elon Musk, the billionaire who took PayPal to market and is behind Tesla Motors, set up Space X as a private space cargo company. It has a contract to supply the international space station, but Musk has also announced plans to send humans into space.
A more direct rival is Blue Origin, a space travel company set up by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who announced last month that he aims to send people into space by 2017, although the first passengers will not be paying customers.
Only just over 500 people have ever travelled into space – that rather arbitrary line that’s defined as 100km above Earth’s surface. Branson’s plan was to rapidly expand that number, but by October 2014 this had already taken much longer than he had anticipated. Ten years earlier Branson had set up Virgin Galactic and gone into business with Scaled Composite, a company created by Burt Rutan, the renowned aerospace engineer who built SpaceShipOne, the first privately constructed and owned spacecraft to reach space.
SpaceShipOne had been funded by Microsoft’s Paul Allen as a scientific challenge rather than a commercial enterprise. But Branson wanted to build the world’s first spaceline for civilians, and with Rutan on board he announced that the first public space flights would begin in 2007. And the first passenger would be one Richard Branson. That turned out to be a wildly ambitious prediction. But then Branson’s brand image – with his attention-grabbing air balloon and powerboat escapades – is based on wild ambition.
And on that bright October day in California, it must have seemed as if Branson’s commercial blast-off was finally in sight. That was until the Enterprise broke up in mid-air, killing the co-pilot Michael Alsbury, but miraculously leaving the pilot-in-command, Peter Siebold, to fall 10 miles and survive.
It was an incredible descent in which the injured, oxygen-starved and freezing Siebold slipped in and out of consciousness while managing to free himself from his pilot’s seat, thus enabling his parachute to open automatically at around 20,000ft and deliver him, broken-boned but alive, to the ground.
At that moment the future of Virgin Galactic seemed to lie with the Enterprise in ruins in the desert. As Branson rushed to the crash site he was filled with doubts about the project’s survival. “For 12 hours after the accident we were very much trying to decide whether it was worth the risk of continuing,” he tells me. “I’m not the sort of person who gives up on things. The first time we crossed the Atlantic in the balloon it crashed, and we went on and did the Pacific. First time we crossed the Atlantic in a boat it sank, and we went on and got the record. So, generally speaking, we will pick ourselves up, brush ourselves down and carry on. But in the first 12 hours we did not know if any of the accident was our fault or whether it was a technical issue that couldn’t be rectified.”
Then it became clear that the crash was the consequence of a catastrophic pilot error. Alsbury had prematurely released a lever that controlled the aircraft’s moveable tail section, triggering a chain of events that resulted in the craft’s mid-air break-up.
Mistakes happen in test flights, and the death of test pilots has not been uncommon in the history of space flight. But the history of space flight has been governmental or military and therefore subject to different expectations. Nasa reported a 3% fatality rate when it was busy sending people up to space.
As Branson said just eight months before the accident: “For a government-owned company, you can just about get away with losing 3% of your clients. For a private company you can’t really lose anybody.”
He was talking about paying clients, but, still, any loss of life was bad publicity and potentially a commercial death knell – especially considering the cost of a ticket to space. The first 100 “future astronauts” who signed up for Virgin Galactic’s journey to 100km above the Earth had paid $200,000 for the privilege. A further 600, who would follow the first 100 into space, put down a sizeable deposit on a $250,000 ticket. All 700 would experience zero-gravity for six minutes and look down on the planet curving away beneath them. But no one wants to lay out that kind of money to die.
Virgin Galactic put out a statement in which it appeared to distance itself from the accident, noting that it was its partner Scaled Composite that was responsible for the flight, and the two pilots were Scaled employees. Previous communiques about successful flights had not made such distinctions.
In the event very few future astronauts pulled out. Nevertheless Virgin, whose new manufacturing arm the Spaceship Company was already building a second spacecraft, suspended ticket sales. A subsequent investigation by the US National Transportation Safety Board found that there was a failure by Scaled Composite “to consider and protect against human error”.
Sixteen months on from the crash, Scaled Composite had been removed from the picture, and the world’s media were invited back to Mojave to see the unveiling of the new spacecraft…
Mojave Air and Space Port is not just a site for aeronautical births, it’s also a giant graveyard for old and disused aircraft that sit around, sometimes for years on end, slowly being corroded or cannibalised. It’s an eerie setting in many ways, a limitless vista of futuristic visions and broken dreams, of soaring ambition and once-modern flying machines brought sadly back down to earth.
Around the airport are dotted a number of giant hangars. In one of these, hundreds of Virgin Galactic and the Space Company personnel and media representatives and future astronauts are gathered to witness the first public viewing of the new aircraft.
Among them is Dave Mackay, a bald, short, quietly spoken man in his late 50s. You’d walk past him in the street without taking a second look, but he is Virgin Galactic’s chief test pilot and therefore possesses the kind of nerveless courage that is the preserve of a tiny fraction of humanity.
Mackay’s lifelong aspiration has been to be an astronaut. That’s why he became an RAF pilot. He always hoped Britain would develop a space programme but by the time he quit the RAF in 1995 and joined Virgin Atlantic to fly Boeing 747s, he had given up on that dream. Then along came Virgin Galactic, and space beckoned once more.
He had piloted the test flight immediately before the one that crashed in 2014. Did Alsbury’s death make him think again? “Michael’s death was devastating for everyone here,” he says. “He was a lovely man. But no, it didn’t make me reconsider. I’m used to it. Three of my colleagues in the RAF died. When I first heard about the death rate among fighter pilots I couldn’t believe it. But you adjust to it. And that’s the same with being a test pilot. We paid our respects to Michael but then continued with the job.”
He tells me about the “exhilaration” of flying in SpaceShipTwo. Adapted from Burt Rutan’s design for SpaceShipOne, the spacecraft – or “vehicle” as everyone calls it in Mojave – is carried into the air by a mothership, the twin-fuselage WhiteKnightTwo. SpaceShipTwo is designed with Rutan’s revolutionary “feathering mechanism”, a shape-changing airfoil that creates a shuttlecock effect on re-entry, and helps the aircraft – unlike those used by Space X and Blue Origin – to land on a runway. On take-off, the mothership releases the spacecraft at 50,000 feet. “At first there is silence,” says Mackay, “and then the engines fire up and you blast off, and it really gets going.”
He compares it to putting your foot down in a performance car if the acceleration could go on for over a minute. Only “it’s so much greater than that”. He tells Virgin marketing people that they’ve got it wrong: they sell it on zero gravity and the experience of looking back down at the curvature of the Earth. “But,” he says without a trace of hyperbole, “I believe the journey up there will be the thing.”
Inside the hangar we hear speeches from Virgin Galactic bigwigs, trumpeting what a fabulous achievement the new aircraft is. But it’s essentially the same as the one that crashed, with a few minor alterations, including a safety lock to prevent the premature initiation of the feathering system that led to the crash. This event in the desert is not the launch of a new aircraft – more testing is required before it leaves the ground. It’s not even a product launch, because the new product is largely the same as the old one. But it could be seen as a relaunch of Virgin Galactic – a chance to announce to the world that everything is fine and back on track.
For that reason, perhaps, there is a sense of corporate nervousness in the air. A figure of $500m has been mentioned as the amount so far invested in the venture. That’s a lot to lose if things go pear shaped. Understandably, no one wants to spend too much time reflecting on the accident. Alsbury’s name is mentioned but it’s a swift reference to the past before moving quickly on to the glorious future. The note that everyone strives for is epic, historic and optimistic.
“Together we open space to change the world for good,” is the Virgin Galactic mission statement, repeated several times. There are recorded messages from Stephen Hawking, who hopes to be among the first passengers, and the young human rights campaigner Malala Yousafzai. Sarah Brightman, one of the future astronauts, sings Happy Birthday to Branson’s one-year-old granddaughter. There’s a valedictory sentimentality to proceedings, as if humanity itself was preparing to vacate the Earth.
Amid the songs, speeches and testaments comes the curtain-raising moment as Branson rides out in a Land Rover – sponsor of the project – towing the new SpaceShipTwo named VSS Unity. He’s dressed in a black leather biker’s jacket, blue jeans and a crisp white shirt, his flowing snowy locks swept back to his collar and his goatee beard and moustache broken by a trademark beaming smile.
He looks like a retired Hell’s Angel from the stockbroker belt, but it works. This is the man the media has come to see: Branson the eternal billionaire rebel; the consummate self-promoting businessman; the man who has jazzed up planes, trains and now, he hopes, spacecraft. In a hail of flashbulbs, Virgin Galactic is back in business.
But what makes people want to travel to space? Branson likes to compare it to the early days of jet travel. That was prohibitively expensive for the vast majority, but just as jet travel has come to the point where many millions now fly, so one day, he says, will space travel. But those early jet passengers had destinations. Six minutes in suborbital space can’t really be described as a destination. So what’s the attraction?
Branson believes the question requires no answer for half the people in the world because they instinctively understand the desire to go to space. For the benefit of the other half, he suggests it’s a means of getting to know ourselves better, and in particular to respect our miraculous place in the universe. He tells me: “We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things. There’s a wonderful book called The Overview Effect, which has interviews with all the people who’ve been to space and [tells of] their experiences, and how it’s changed them. I look forward to being changed in a positive way.”
Put this way, and leaving aside the commercial potential, the journey becomes less spatial than spiritual.
There is room on board for six passengers. Branson has long said he will be on the first flight along with family members, several of whom, including his 92-year-old mother, were present in Mojave. But which family members? “We’ll have to see nearer the time,” he says. “The whole family want to go: nephews, nieces, everyone except my wife. Both my children have now got their hands full with babies, so it’s possible that on the initial flight I’ll go up on my own and they’ll go up on subsequent flights. We’ll make that decision in six or nine months’ time.”
For the original 100 who paid out $200,000, there is a lottery system to decide who goes when. Several celebrities are rumoured to be among the group, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, but none were present at Mojave.
However, many non-celebrity future astronauts were there, among them Ed Holliday, a youthful-looking 72-year-old from West Virginia – “just like Chuck Yeager”. Like Branson, he found the question of why he wanted to go to space barely worth raising. “I always say that’s the backwards question. Why would you not want to do this? What possible reason would you not want to go to space?”
What about the crash?
“That’s irrelevant. That’s why they call them test pilots,” he guffaws. “They were testing the vehicle.”
Holliday is a pilot himself of 40 years, though he made his money in the “investment business”. Along with the other founders, he’s been through simulator training in Philadelphia in a giant centrifuge with a rotating bucket at the end that creates six G-force. “That’s why they don’t have 100 founders now. Some didn’t like that. Some got airsick or burst into tears.” He lets out another big laugh.
There are now said to be 89 founders left. Namira Salim, a Pakistani woman who lives in Monaco, with a family construction business in Dubai, is one of them. She says that space travel was her childhood dream. “It’s about taking a risk,” she tells me, “reaching for your dreams and doing the impossible to inspire others, and above all I think space flight is about making space for others. You know one could buy an expensive ticket and go to the international space station, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to open space travel for the common man. But by being part of such a programme as this you’re ensuring that the price will come down due to our initial investment, and any common person who wants to go to space can one day go to space, and moreover it makes a peaceful contribution to Earth and to the different technologies we can use to make life better for humanity. So that’s the motivation.”
In this telling, space travel becomes a kind of altruistic act of generosity towards the “common person” and a step towards world peace. That’s quite a billing to live up to, especially at this stage. Of course it’s necessary for Virgin to make its future astronauts, especially the founders, feel special, as though they are travel pioneers and social innovators. But the reality is that they will fly 100km up from the Earth’s surface, hang around for a few minutes and come back down to the same place. In other words, it will be the best funfair ride the planet has to offer, but a funfair ride all the same.
Branson talks of point-to-point travel as a long-term aim, going into space as a means of getting from one part of the Earth to another at tremendous speed. He is also looking at setting up a habitat in space and then doing orbital flights. “That’s something we’re working on for the future,” he tells me.
He says the Spaceship Company is also exploring whether it could work to reroute a giant asteroid, should one come heading towards Earth. “That’s the sort of thing we’d need to get government money as well as private money to make happen.”
In the meantime, another division of Virgin is making large numbers of small satellites. “There are 4 billion people who don’t have internet or Wi-Fi access,” he says. “This is the best way to get to them. Nothing will pull people out of poverty more than being connected.”
But he comes back once more to what he says are the “millions and millions of people out there who would love to become astronauts. If we can make it environmentally friendly, if we can make it affordable and if we can make it safe, then in time your children and my grandchildren will all have the chance to go to space.”
To critics who argue that firing rockets to take sightseers up into the darkness is environmentally unsound and unnecessary, Branson says that the passengers on his first space flights will account for an amount of carbon “not dissimilar to an upper-class seat flying from London to New York and back”, and that over the next few years they believe they can make the flights “as near as dammit carbon neutral”.
Having made several predictions over the years about the timing of the initial flight, Branson is under strict instructions by his employees not to give any further dates. When I ask if he aims to beat Bezos’s Blue Origin outfit into space, he says: “We’re not going to be in a race with him for obvious reasons.”
Would you be disappointed, I ask, if in two years’ time the first flight had still not been made?
“I would be astounded,” he replies.
Perhaps a better clue to the expected date is that when I ask him if his mother would be on board in the first flights, he says “She’ll be close to 93 then. Whether her body could cope with the G-force I’m not sure.”
That would mean he’s looking at the first flight some time next year. If you’re interested, it’s probably wise to apply soon. Virgin Galactic is about to start selling tickets again. To add to the current 700 ticket holders, Branson thinks there are a few thousand people who can afford the current prices. And they’re going up, not down.
It will now cost $300,000 to become an astronaut.
“Then,” says Branson, “we’ll slowly but steadily start bringing the price down as we build more spaceships and more spaceports around the world. I would love it if in 20 years’ time people who’d done relatively well can afford to go.”
If you can’t wait, then it’s time to mortgage the house. After all, in space no one can hear you scream.
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