Beyond: Our Future in Space (12 page)

Unassuming and soft-spoken, Rutan is one of the foremost space innovators of our time. He’s created nearly 400 aircraft designs. His planes have broken dozens of records and five are displayed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. In 2008, he took another step in his progression as a space pioneer when he formed an alliance with a British billionaire who is as expansive as Rutan is self-contained.

The Media Mogul

Richard Branson owes a lot to his mum. To her dismay, he was dyslexic and withdrawn as a child, refusing to talk to adults and clinging to her skirt. To break him of these habits, she once stopped the car three miles from home and let him out. At age seven, he had to talk to strangers to find his way home. He made it, though it took him ten hours. This harsh treatment made him more comfortable talking to adults.

Then she stepped in again when he was twenty-one, to save him from significant jail time. Branson started a magazine called
The Student
just before he dropped out of school and then began a mail-order record business he called Virgin, running both operations from the crypt of a church. He opened his first Virgin record store on Oxford Street in London in 1976 but had major cash-flow problems. To pay off a bank loan, he pretended to buy records for export to evade an excise sales tax. He was arrested, spent a night in jail, and was able to avoid a trial after his mother remortgaged the family home to pay the settlement. He emerged from the episode chastened and emboldened to do better. As he noted in his autobiography, “It is unlikely, not to say impossible, that someone with a criminal record would have been allowed to set up an airline.”
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Meet Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, disarming yet self-serving, humble yet acquisitive, charming yet brash, founder of an empire of 400 companies, and the fourth wealthiest person in Britain. He has all the hallmarks of ADHD and it’s a good bet he has the explorer gene.

Branson cut his teeth selling records, but he operates like a butterfly collector, or a butterfly, flitting from flower to flower. He’s dabbled in everything from condoms (his Mates brand failed) and mail-order brides (he couldn’t get any customers) to booze (Virgin Vodka) and pulp fiction (Virgin Comics). He’s evolved a clever form of branded venture capitalism where the Virgin Group acts as a loose umbrella and the brands are all leveraged by his gift for marketing, yet each one is free to experiment and fail. He’s even branded his intuitive, freewheeling management style, expounded on it at length in a 600-page autobiography titled
Losing My Virginity
. Branson laughs when he says, “I don’t complicate my life with financial reports,” and he claims not to know the difference between net and gross profit.
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Branson has eclectic interests, but he recognized the aviation and space industries as particularly ripe for innovation. He left the safe harbor of a highly profitable music selling and recording business to go into the risky commercial airline business. Virgin Atlantic started in 1984 with a single jumbo jet leased for a year. He nearly failed at the outset when birds flew into one of the engines during a certification flight and he didn’t have the million dollars needed to replace it. He managed to borrow the money and a few days later had an inaugural flight that became a transatlantic party with free-flowing booze and topless models. He stuffed the flight with journalists to guarantee good publicity and to burnish his reputation as capitalism’s fun-loving wild child. Then he had to cope with a long and brutal fight with government-subsidized British Airways. His adversary used such dirty tricks as impersonating his staff, hacking his passenger lists, and spreading lies about him and his company.
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Branson sued for libel and won a billion dollars in an out-of-court settlement, but rising fuel costs and an economic downturn made running an airline in the early 1990s difficult. In a decision that he said broke his heart, he sold his music business to keep the airline afloat. Characteristically, he reacted to his troubles by reaching even higher, getting into a challenging business that had no track record at all—space travel. He said he was inspired to think about space travel by a question he was asked on a BBC children’s TV show in 1988.

Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 and then commissioned Burt Rutan to scale up his SpaceShipOne design to be suitable for space tourism. Whereas SpaceShipOne had one pilot, SpaceShipTwo carries two pilots and six passengers. The carrier aircraft, White Knight II, will take off from a custom-built facility in New Mexico, with a 10,000-foot runway and a suitably “space age” terminal building. At an altitude of 52,000 feet, SpaceShipTwo will rocket upward to just over 100 kilometers, or 60 miles, where the curved limb of the Earth will be visible and the sky will be jet black. The total flight time will be two and a half hours, with just six minutes of parabolic weightlessness at the top of the arc of its trajectory. For this experience, Virgin Galactic is asking a cool quarter of a million dollars (
Figure 19
).

They’re getting it. As of late 2013, more than 650 people had paid deposits totaling $80 million. The list of people on the reservation list included Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Katy Perry, Paris Hilton, and Stephen Hawking. Branson, a diehard Trekkie, named his new spacecraft the Enterprise. He asked William Shatner to go up but said Shatner declined because he was afraid of flying. Shatner’s version is that Branson asked him how much he’d pay to go on the inaugural flight and he replied, “How much would you pay
me
to go on it?”
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Branson has said that White Knight II represents “the chance for our ever-growing group of future astronauts and other scientists to see the world in a new light.” He thinks humanity will have to spread beyond the planet in order to prosper.

However, even for pioneers with the magic touch like Branson and Rutan, the space business is risky. In 2007, three people were killed and another three injured in an explosion at Rutan’s Scaled Composites factory, and a year later Rutan said, “Don’t believe anyone who tells you the safety will be the same as a modern airliner’s.” SpaceShipTwo reaches a top speed of 2,500 mph and passengers pull 6 g’s on the way down. They wear helmetless spacesuits, which could be a problem if the spacecraft loses pressure at 300,000 feet. In more than thirty test flights, only three have been at supersonic speed. Early in 2014, Virgin Galactic switched to a new, plastic-based, solid rocket fuel, and in October a pilot was killed and another seriously injured when the SpaceShipTwo rocket malfunctioned. This will add to the delay of the first commercial launch, already totaling five years.

Branson’s never been stuck behind an executive desk—he’s a hands-on adventurer. In 1986, he raced a boat across the Atlantic faster than anyone had before. The next year, he was first to fly a hot-air balloon across the Atlantic. In 1991, he broke both distance and speed records crossing the Pacific, also in a balloon. When SpaceShipTwo finally has its inaugural flight, Branson and his two adult children, Holly and Sam, will be on board.

The Space Futurist

“Over the next 20 to 30 years, humanity will establish itself in space, independent of Earth.” Peter Diamandis is sublimely confident that the teething problems of the private space industry will soon be over and we’ll be on our way to becoming an interplanetary species. This isn’t a goal mentioned anywhere in the Space Act that guides NASA. As he put it, “Not since lungfish crawled out of the oceans onto land has this happened!”
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Like Richard Branson, Peter Diamandis is a serial entrepreneur and a Trekkie. He started young. By the age of eight, he was lecturing friends and family on the space program and at twelve he won first place in a rocket design competition. As a sophomore at MIT, he founded a space organization for students that spread nationally. He went to Harvard Medical School—mostly to please his parents, who were both medical professionals—but the pull of space was stronger. Before attaining an MD, he started the International Space University, an institution that has produced 3,300 graduates and has a $30 million campus in Strasbourg, France. He also started a company named International MicroSpace to launch microsatellites, winning a $100 million contract from the US Defense Department. But Diamandis was overstretched and the company couldn’t deliver on the contract, so he sold it (for a fat profit, naturally).

In 1994, Diamandis read Charles Lindbergh’s memoir
The Spirit of St. Louis
and was inspired. He learned that a hotel owner named Raymond Orteig had put up a $25,000 prize in May 1919 for the first nonstop airplane flight between New York and Paris. Nine teams spent a total of $400,000 trying to win. Lindbergh was considered a dark horse, an outsider with no backing and little aviation experience. He had quit college and spent his early twenties as a “barnstormer,” crisscrossing the country in a small biplane giving joy rides and doing aerobatics. He spent a year flying for the Army and another year flying mail for the US Post Office Department. He heard about the Orteig Prize and was immediately interested.

Six famous aviators had died trying to win the prize by the time Lindbergh entered the competition. He had never even flown over a large body of water. The press dubbed the twenty-five-year-old “the flying fool.” He made the epic flight from New York to Paris in thirty-three hours, with his fuel-laden plane barely clearing the telephone lines at the end of the runway, having to deal with fog and ice along the way, and landing by dead reckoning on the darkened Le Bourget airfield.
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Flying was still dangerous when Lindbergh won the prize in 1927, but excitement and heightened interest propelled a new industry. It had taken eight years for the prize to be won, but within three years passenger air traffic increased thirtyfold. The prize spawned the $250 billion aviation industry.

Diamandis had found his business model.

The cost of going into space hadn’t changed for thirty years, so it was the natural target for his “incentive prize.” When he announced the X Prize, he had no funding and most of the people to whom he pitched the idea thought he was crazy, which only encouraged him. After five years, he persuaded the Ansari family to fund a $10 million prize—competition spurs innovation (
Figure 20
). The head of the family is Anousheh Ansari, who was born in Iran and trained as an engineer. She moved to the United States after the revolution in 1979 and founded a series of telecommunications companies.

Seven organizations spent $100 million trying to win the prize. Burt Rutan succeeded in 2004, and his SpaceShipOne now hangs above Apollo 11 and next to Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis in the Smithsonian. Two years later, Anousheh Ansari herself became the fourth space tourist when she traveled to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Since then, X Prize challenges have proliferated. After giving a talk at Google, Diamandis was approached by a guy in a T-shirt who said, “Let’s have lunch.” It was Larry Page, the Google CEO, who has since helped extend the scope of the X Prize to address humanity’s broad challenges in health, energy, and the environment. In addition to Larry Page, the board of trustees includes film director James Cameron, media guru Arianna Huffington, and astronaut Richard Garriott.