Richard Branson is an ambitious man. Ask him about the potential for his Virgin Galactic business – as I did at the unveiling of his space capsule in the Mojave desert in California on Monday – and he does not hold back.
Virgin Galactic has ordered five vehicles that can take six passengers into sub-orbital flight about 110km above the earth’s surface at a time. But Sir Richard thinks that, in 10 years’ time, it could have 40 of the six-passenger craft flying twice a day each.
And that is only the start:
“Anything is possible, which is what is exciting. At the right price level, there will be enormous quantities of space ships and space ports around the world. We need to start dreaming about intercontinental travel, going out of the earth’s atmosphere and down again.
“I dream about Virgin hotels in space, about getting little spaceships from those hotels to go around the moon and back at night. That is a lot easier than landing on the moon.”
That is plenty to be going on with. But before any of it happens, Sir Richard needs to ensure that all of his pioneer space travelers return safely from what is a risky endeavour.
Sir Richard’s spacecraft are being built for Virgin Galactic by Scaled Composites, the company that won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 for sending a craft into sub-orbital space, 110 km above the earth’s surface.
Burt Rutan, its founder, said at the launch event that developing the commercial space vehicle had been harder, and taken longer, than he had anticipated because of safety demands.
Instead of 4 per cent of astronauts dying – the average rate for government space programmes – he hoped to make Virgin space travel as safe as “the early airlines”.
That still sounded risky to me and Sir Richard told me he would wait until the programme reached a higher level of safety, which he estimated would take 18 months to two years.
“I think technology that is being been developed will be safer than Burt says. As commercial spaceship company we need to bring everyone back, so we are in no hurry. We want to be absolutely sure that everyone gets a return ticket.”
Yes, a return ticket would be a selling point.
