Virgin Galactic

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut

by Nicholas Schmidle  · 3 May 2021  · 342pp  · 101,370 words

Branson’s multimillion-dollar spaceship smashed into pieces on the desert floor, and, perhaps with it, Branson’s dream of making his space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, a reality. Stucky was chasing his own dream. He’d spent almost forty years trying to become an astronaut. He’d done stints in the

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. “If you’re building a spacecraft, I’d love to come with you.” In 1999, Branson went so far as to register a new company: Virgin Galactic. He liked the name and the idea of a space tourism service. “I hope in five years a reusable rocket will have been developed which

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resist promoting his outrageously cool new venture—even if it meant setting wildly unrealistic expectations. Space flights would begin soon, he said. “Within five years, Virgin Galactic will have created over three thousand new astronauts, from many countries,” Branson announced, in late 2004. Rutan liked a challenge. But he thought Branson’s

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New York Times headline. Intrigued, Patterson read more and learned that Branson was promoting a commercial version of the same flight with his new company, Virgin Galactic. The company was catering to a unique client, an adventurous type with plenty of disposable income. Patterson fit the profile. He followed news about Virgin

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no idea. There were some legitimate reasons for this. The work was highly technical, and the commercial space industry was new. Plus, at that point Virgin Galactic consisted of just a few salespeople living in London, thousands of miles from Mojave. But there were legal restrictions, too. Thirty years earlier, lawmakers had

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momentum with a definite media strategy,” because Branson wasn’t interested in just creating a business, said Attenborough. It was more fitting to think about Virgin Galactic as a movement, as “the democratization of space.” He said, “To put poets in space and artists as well as scientists and movie stars and

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determined to “learn from this and move forward.” In private Branson was more solemn. Customers were demanding refunds. Sponsors were backing out. He contemplated whether Virgin Galactic could survive. He had previously said that NASA might have lost 3 percent of its astronauts but “a private program can’t afford to lose

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definitely has me concerned,” he said in January 2010. By 2011 Moses was wondering what he might do next. Then his wife, Beth, heard that Virgin Galactic was trying to hire a director of operations. He and Beth had met in the engineering department at Purdue, where she also studied aerospace. She

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creating an orbital vehicle? We will start to do that. I just had a meeting with a senator, talking about asteroids. And they asked, ‘Can Virgin Galactic come up with ideas to try to remove giant asteroids coming toward the Earth?’ We’ll have a look at that. And, ‘Could

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Virgin Galactic help sort out the debris in space?’ We’ll have a look at that, too. And once all that’s sorted we’d like to

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Island.” Patterson hadn’t paid for a safari. He was in it for a rocket ride, which now seemed less and less likely. Being a Virgin Galactic “founder,” Patterson would supposedly be on one of the first flights, but there were nearly a hundred founders. Virgin could make ten or fifteen flights

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can create the best—the best hotel chain, the best clubs, the best spaceship company—it’ll become very valuable.” At that point, he valued Virgin Galactic and an uncrewed satellite-launching spin-off, Virgin Orbit, at “some billions of dollars,” but said that they could soon be worth “many billions.” He

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previous afternoon he had toured the test site run by his other rocket company, Virgin Orbit, the satellite launch provider which Branson spun off from Virgin Galactic in 2017. He wandered around, mouth agape at the Asimovian scene of engineers bent over intricate foil-wrapped tubes and hoses and piping, multistory tanks

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and loafers and went with Agin to the Broken Bit for dinner. They sat at the bar. Another patron noticed Stucky’s sweatshirt with the Virgin Galactic logo. The patron said his son worked there and asked Stucky what he did for the company. When Stucky said he had flown SpaceShipTwo that

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space tourism industries: those looked solid and promising. Luke Colby, the pith helmet–wearing propulsion engineer, said, “At the end of the day, I think Virgin Galactic will be remembered for being the first, but not necessarily the most successful. That gives me some sadness. But I’m also hugely proud of

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, cockpit videos, previously published accounts, contemporaneous notes, and many others. I, moreover, witnessed many of the events and conversations myself. I was effectively embedded with Virgin Galactic for almost four years, an arrangement that dated back to late 2014, shortly after the crash, when I went to my editor at the New

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products could fall as well as rise”: Robert Watts, “Fore Street,” Sunday Telegraph (UK), January 16, 2005. “open for business by the beginning of 2005”: Virgin Galactic, “Virgin Group Sign Deal with Paul G. Allen’s Mojave Aerospace,” press release, September 27, 2004. “The flow of sophisticated weapons”: Clifford P. Case, Congressional

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5th Edition of MIPIM UK at Critical Time for UK Property,” MIPIM UK press release, October 19, 2018. “Cosmic Brand and Marketing”: “DediPower Helps Send Virgin Galactic Supersonic,” press release, December 17, 2009. Necker was a tropical paradise: Specter, “Branson’s Luck.” “We will dub the event ‘2008’”: Internal correspondence provided to

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author. “Business as usual”: Alicia Chang, “Publicity-Seeking Virgin Galactic Keeps Low Profile After Mojave Desert Explosion,” Associated Press, August 26, 2007. “a Chevrolet’s functional reliability”: Rich and Janos, Skunk Works. “One bolt falls

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Adentro National Historic Trail, Bureau of Land Management, nps.gov. “New Mexico will be known around the world … a chance to go home”: Leonard David, “Virgin Galactic Partners with New Mexico on Spaceport,” Space.com, December 14, 2005. “definitely one of the coolest”: “Governor’s Remarks at

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Virgin Galactic’s Unveiling of SpaceShipTwo,” States News Service, December 7, 2009. “Isn’t that the sexiest spaceship ever?”: John Johnson Jr., “A Giant Step for Space

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, November 20, 2013. “We need to make some bold moves … Fire them as soon as possible”: Email provided to author. “Delay is a strange word”: “Virgin Galactic Space Tourism Could Begin in 2013,” BBC News, October 26, 2011. “Things are going incredibly well”: Robin McKie, “Destination Outer Space,” Observer Magazine, June 17

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, May 11, 2014. “raise his voice or lose his cool … data computer … turn any sky into a series of numbers”: “Co-pilot Who Died in Virgin Galactic Crash Hailed as ‘Renaissance Man,’” Associated Press, November 2, 2014. “I’ve taken flights, rented cars”: Facebook message provided to author. “Once you experience that

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… They took this pilot’s life”: Joël Glenn Brenner interview on CNN Newsroom, October 31, 2014. “We fell short”: Kaytlyn Leslie, “Both Test Pilots in Virgin Galactic Crash Graduated from Cal Poly,” San Luis Obispo Tribune, November 1, 2014. “can’t afford to lose anybody”: Leigh Buchanan, “Big Ideas Also Mean Big

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Awkward Family Reunion,” ParabolicArc.com, October 5, 2015. “a great friend and a great spaceship”: Marky Stucky comment, “Whitesides Vows to Stay the Course, Defends Virgin Galactic’s Approach to Safety,” by Doug Messier, ParabolicArc.com, November 15, 2014. “We’ve received countless messages … no mission more remarkable”: Mark Stucky, Memorial Service

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Return of Son’s Stolen Ashes,” KRQE, March 1, 2016. “I’ve already got what I paid for”: Elizabeth Culliford, “Cufflinks and the Caribbean: How Virgin Galactic Kept Space Tourists’ Interest and Money,” Reuters, April 12, 2019. “one-man publicity circus”: Geraldine Fabrikant, “Of All That He Sells, He Sells Himself Best

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does, in fact, have a scant atmosphere. “Is There an Atmosphere on the Moon?” NASA.com, April 12, 2013. In 2018, they spent $118 million: Virgin Galactic FY 2018 Financial Results. “any place on the planet”: David Goldfein, Air Power Conference Keynote Address, July 17, 2017. “I’m heartened to see Sir

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most painful day of her life, and I cannot thank her enough. High-profile companies in high-risk industries are not often welcoming to journalists. Virgin Galactic nonetheless brought me into the fold. I want to thank Christine Choi for sharing my belief that there was a riveting story to be told

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DiVenere Here: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images Here: Pamela Schmidle Here: NASA Here: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post/Getty Images Here: National Transportation Safety Board Here: Virgin Galactic Here: Pamela Schmidle Here: Pamela Schmidle Here: James Blair/NASA/JSC Here: Nicholas Schmidle Here: Mike Satren/High Wing Photo Images Here: Dan Winters Here

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: Nicholas Schmidle Here: Virgin Galactic Here: Cheryl Agin Here: Nicholas Schmidle Here: Virgin Galactic Here: Cheryl Agin Here: Virgin Galactic Here: Virgin Galactic INDEX The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your

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Museum “overview effect” and party in 2009 and personality contrasted with Whitesides press coverage and registers Virgin Galactic renegade credentials of restlessness of rumor about pulling out of project Rutan and in Saudi Arabia sees Virgin Galactic as a movement SpaceShipTwo flight with Beth Moses and SpaceShipTwo’s first foray into space and at

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Research Center (NASTAR) National Air and Space Museum National Geographic National Transportation Safety Board NATO command Navy NBC Necker Island New Mexico space industry and Virgin Galactic announces move to New Shepard rocket New Yorker NF-104A Nichols, Clint 'N Sync Obama, Barack O’Donoghue, Dennis Officer Candidate School Oldfield, Mike, Tubular

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Bells Orbital ATK “overview effect” Page, Larry Pakistan Palermo, Enrico Palihapitiya, Chamath Palmdale, California Parrish, Brandon Patterson, Mark applies for spot on Virgin Galactic spaceship party in 2009 and Pecile, Nicola Pence, Mike Persall, Wes Petersen, Frank Jr. Phelps, Michael plastic-fuel motor Pomerantz, William Powell, Colin Principal, Victoria

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SpaceShipOne and party in 2009 and PR and rocket-powered flight test Rutan’s philosophy at SETP tour and SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo and Stucky and Virgin Galactic and Schmidle, Bohan Schmidle, Nicholas (author) background of centrifuge training and at ceremony honoring Stucky and Sturckow childhood of compartmentalization and embeds with

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Virgin Galactic field trip to Mojave and in Idaho invited to Virgin Islands by Branson meets Stucky in Pakistan Patterson and “Rocket Man” Shane and Stucky and

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Sturckow and takes sons to National Air and Space Museum trip to Mojave with family Virgin Galactic’s adversarial turn against writing for New Yorker Schmidle, Oscar Schmidle, Pamela Schmidle, Robert (“Rooster”) in Bosnia at ceremony honoring Stucky and Sturckow goes down

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glide flight (2018) before rocket-powered flights stability issues and test flight with Beth Moses on board and thermal protection system on 2016 rollout of Virgin Galactic and weight issues and wreckage of Space Shuttle program Challenger Columbia Discovery Space Station space tourism/travel changing the way people think about definition of

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Beth Moses on board and as test pilot for NASA as test pilot in Middle East tours Scaled Composites in training squadron in Yuma, Arizona Virgin Galactic and wager with Fischer in Washington, DC at winging ceremony Stucky, Paul Stucky, Sascha Sturckow, Rick (“C.J. [Caustic Junior]”) ceremony in his honor first

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“transonic zone” Travolta, John Trump, Donald Tyson, Neil deGrasse U-2 Under Armour United Airlines United Arab Emirates US Congress US Defense Department Vance, Ashlee Virgin Galactic absence of metrics and accuses Scaled Composites of sloppiness announces move to New Mexico author’s view of Branson’s dream of challenges faced by

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. Thoroughbred 31. The Space Mirror 32. Wings EPILOGUE Magic AUTHOR’S NOTE NOTES SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ILLUSTRATION CREDITS INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT TEST GODS: VIRGIN GALACTIC AND THE MAKING OF A MODERN ASTRONAUT. Copyright © 2021 by Author. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 120 Broadway, New York

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DiVenere; cover photograph of night sky © Shutterstock The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Names: Schmidle, Nicholas, author. Title: Test gods: Virgin Galactic and the making of a modern astronaut / Nicholas Schmidle. Description: First edition. | New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index

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. Identifiers: LCCN 2020052702 (print) | LCCN 2020052703 (ebook) | ISBN 9781250229755 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250229748 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Space vehicles—United States—Testing. | Virgin Galactic—Employees. | Test pilots—United States. | Astronauts—United States. | Space tourism. Classification: LCC TL920 .S36 2021 (print) | LCC TL920 (ebook) | DDC 387.8092/273—dc23 LC

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

by Christian Davenport  · 20 Mar 2018  · 390pp  · 108,171 words

fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX’s contract is worth up to $2.6 billion; Boeing’s, $4.2 billion. October 2014 Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashes in the Mojave Desert. April 2015 Blue Origin successfully launches New Shepard to the edge of space for the first time. June

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on to other ventures. So, he sold the rights in a deal worth up to $25 million over fifteen years. Branson, who had added Virgin Galactic to the list of companies he ran under the Virgin brand, quickly had the Virgin logo painted on SpaceShipOne just in time for its X

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a company with ambitions that could finally meet Branson’s stratospheric hype. A space company, called Virgin Galactic. WITHOUT A ROCKET or a spacecraft or any real knowledge of space travel, Branson registered the name “Virgin Galactic Airways,” hopeful that he’d one day be able to start a space company. He spent

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GlobalFlyer here,” he told Branson. It was SpaceShipOne. Knowing Branson would want to seize the opportunity, one of his executives rushed to register the name “Virgin Galactic”—only to find out that Branson had already done it years before. Within days, Branson was in the Mojave Desert, looking at SpaceShipOne. This was

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Virgin’s vaunted PR machine into promoting the allure of the final frontier—and how he was going to make it available to the masses. Virgin Galactic would become the “world’s first commercial spaceline,” he crowed, one that would transform everyday paying tourists into full-fledged astronauts. He vowed that

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s maiden flight would happen as early as 2007, and that it would fly three thousand people in the first five years. He even promoted Virgin Galactic during a Super Bowl commercial for Volvo in February 2005, just months after obtaining the rights to SpaceShipOne. The ad featured the liftoff of a

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approached the endeavor with the same gale-force enthusiasm, promising that flights to space were just around the corner. “By the end of the decade, Virgin Galactic—the most exciting development in the story of modern space history—is planning to make it possible for almost anyone to visit the final frontier

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at an affordable price,” the company said on an early version of its website. Just after the final X Prize flight, and long before Virgin Galactic had anything close to resembling a new spacecraft, it invited potential customers to sign up on its website. By early 2006, Branson showed off a

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, plopping down $200,000 for their seat. Branson’s version of space was cool and sexy, with a Hollywood appeal, and by early 2006 Virgin Galactic already had $13 million in deposits. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie bought tickets. So did Ashton Kutcher and Tom Hanks and Harrison Ford. But it

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I was going. I just up and went.” After Brian Binnie’s successful flight, Beattie vowed to be the first to buy a ticket with Virgin Galactic. If he could do it, almost anyone could. With a mop of near-shoulder-length curls, a pasty Englishman’s demeanor, and a slight

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the Ansari X Prize. Robert Bigelow, the multimillionaire founder of Budget Suites of America, who wanted to build hotels in space, sat across from the Virgin Galactic representatives. John Carmack, the programmer behind such video games as Quake and Doom, sat near the middle. Stu Witt, a former navy pilot who ran

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the Mojave Air and Space Port, was at the far end near Alex Tai and George Whittinghill, who were representing Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which was designing SpaceShipOne’s successor, SpaceShipTwo. Everyone who was anyone in the industry was here. Everyone, that is, except Jeff Bezos, or anyone

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applied quickly and in the time required to support this industry are people who are in it themselves,” said Kelly. Will Whitehorn, the president of Virgin Galactic, was also at the congressional hearing, and he pointed out that killing your customers is generally not a good business practice. “Given that we have

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are fully equipped to savour every second of an experience which will be intense, wonderful and truly unforgettable,” it declared. Now, after years of delays, Virgin Galactic was getting ready to finally fly. Although company executives had warned him not to reveal a timetable for flights, Branson couldn’t contain himself. The

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return to Earth, ten times. But even though it had conducted only four powered test flights by firing the engine, Branson and Virgin Galactic had gone into full marketing mode. Virgin Galactic had signed up sponsorships with Grey Goose, the vodka maker, and Land Rover, which had sponsored a contest to send four winners

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was talking with his son about his experience in the centrifuge, when he got an urgent note. It was from George Whitesides, the CEO of Virgin Galactic. There had been a catastrophic accident. Branson had to go. PETER SIEBOLD WAS in the cockpit again. The forty-three-year-old test pilot

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for Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, which had built and designed SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic, was ready to fly this time. A decade earlier, during the Ansari X Prize, he’d had misgivings about the safety of SpaceShipOne, and

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head on whether it’s your fault or not—actually particularly if it’s your fault,” he recalled. Once he arrived, he spoke to the Virgin Galactic team before talking to the media. “I addressed them all and reassured them as best I could that they had built a beautiful craft,”

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of this copilot is a crippling blow,” Lauer said. “There have been delays; there have been setbacks in the past with this program. Can Virgin Galactic survive the image that has been seen around the world of that vehicle coming apart at forty-five thousand feet?” Was it, Lauer wanted to

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just to Alsbury who wouldn’t have wanted them to quit, but to them. Hadn’t every explorer faced such difficulty? This was the moment Virgin Galactic and the industry had feared—and prepared for. This was their crucible, their Apollo 1 moment. The time to decide whether they would retreat

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was that the general public didn’t seem to understand the difference between what SpaceX was doing and what such companies as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic were attempting. SpaceX’s rockets were launched into orbit; theirs went only to suborbital space and then came back down. For years, Musk had

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“lack of consideration for human factors” led to the midair breakup of the spacecraft. It found that Scaled Composites, which had built the vehicle for Virgin Galactic, had failed to properly train its pilots and did not implement basic safeguards to prevent the human error that caused the accident. Yes, Michael Alsbury

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the basket of the pilot doing it correctly.” Unfortunately, humans inevitably make mistakes, “and the mistake is often times a symptom of a flawed system.” Virgin Galactic responded by implementing an inhibitor that would prevent the pilot from unlocking the feather prematurely. And it fired Scaled Composites, saying it would build the

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spacecraft itself. “From now on, we’ve taken everything in house and anything that happens from today will be down to Virgin Galactic,” Branson said. Now, on February 19, 2016, he had a new SpaceShipTwo to unveil. And his entrance—to the requisite pumping music, swirling lights,

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meant that Spaceport America, the futuristic facility that had cost taxpayers $220 million to build, continued to languish in the New Mexico desert, waiting for Virgin Galactic to fly. The company’s mishap had consequences far greater than an empty spaceport that had been a drain on government coffers; it had cost

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him a ride to space, and added, “I would be very proud to fly in this spaceship.” Instead of trying to erase the past, Virgin Galactic embraced it. One executive choked up when discussing Alsbury’s death and legacy. And the company’s chief executive, George Whitesides, didn’t shy away

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replacing exigency. Even before the event, in an effort to manage expectations and assure potential customers that it was moving deliberately and making safety paramount, Virgin Galactic released a statement warning: “If you are expecting SpaceShipTwo to blast off and head straight to space on the day we unveil her, let us

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statement. Branson and his Virgin brand had never been in the business of “disillusionment,” but of making the illusory real. Death, however, was sobering, and Virgin Galactic was faced with the delicate balance of promoting its newest spacecraft, and the once unthinkable prospect of routine space travel, against the dangers and difficulties

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would lay out how it “poked, prodded, stretched, squeezed, bent, and twisted everything to be used to build these vehicles.” It was as if Virgin Galactic was unveiling a baby’s car seat, not a spacecraft. People who know Branson well often said the playboy image was something of a myth

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a truly great industry. I think that’s where we are headed toward here. “From my point of view, the more the merrier. I want Virgin Galactic to succeed. I want SpaceX to succeed. I want United Launch Alliance to succeed. I want Arianespace to succeed. And, of course, I want

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would be, like, ‘What have you guys been up to? What, I die and the whole thing stops? Dudes, get on with it!’” YEARS AFTER VIRGIN Galactic started touting its space tourism program, it now was about to have competition. Richard Branson was promising all the luxuries that had been associated with

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space for days and weeks at a time,” Allen wrote. “I’d been happy to leave suborbital, high-volume space tourism to Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic. But there was something incomparably thrilling about orbital flight, going back to John Glenn’s ride on the Friendship 7. It’s an experience that

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hurry up,” he said. Now he had competition in Bezos’s Blue Origin, which he relished. The space tourism experiences would be markedly different—Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane versus Blue Origin’s more traditional rocket. “My guess is that quite a lot of people will want to try one and then

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ahead of an engine test at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, 2016. Mike Wager/US Launch Report. NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart and NTSB investigators with Virgin Galactic pilot Todd Ericson after the 2014 fatal crash of SpaceShipTwo in the Mojave desert. Courtesy of the NTSB. Richard Branson celebrates with a giant leap

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while showing off Virgin Galactic’s new SpaceShipTwo in Mojave in 2016. Courtesy of Virgin Galactic. Richard Branson unveils the new SpaceShipTwo, dubbed Unity, at an event in Mojave, California. Copyright © 2016, Ricky Carioti/Washington

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Blue Origin paints a turtle, the company’s mascot, on its booster after every launch. Courtesy of Blue Origin. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo in a glide test flight over Mojave, 2016. Courtesy of Virgin Galactic. A model shows off SpaceX’s spacesuit. Courtesy of SpaceX. An artist’s rendering of what SpaceX’s BFR

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James Gleeson, and Sean Pitt at SpaceX; to Drew Herdener at Amazon; to Caitlin Dietrich at Blue Origin; to Christine Choi and Will Pommerantz at Virgin Galactic; to Steve Lombardi and Jim Jeffries at Vulcan. Thank you also to Tabatha Thompson and Mike Curie at NASA. Eric Stallmer and Tommy Sanford at

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to the launch: Marcia Dunn, “Space Station Supply Launch Called Off in Virginia,” Associated Press, October 28, 2014. The first flights were supposed to start: Virgin Galactic Overview, https://web.archive.org/web/20070331154530/http://virgingalactic.com/htmlsite/overview.htm. For $250,000, Virgin promised: Ibid. It had inked a deal: “NBCUniversal

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Announces Exclusive Partnership with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic to Televise First Commercial Flight to Space,” press release, November 8, 2013. Flying above the Mojave Desert: “G Force Training with

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Virgin Galactic,” October 8, 2014, https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/g-force-training-virgin-galactic. They were close friends: Christian Davenport and Jöel Glenn Brenner, “Two Pilots Who Were Close Friends Now Tied Together

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In-flight Breakup of SpaceShipTwo,” July 28, 2015. As board member Robert Sumwalt: Christian Davenport, “NTSB Blames Human Error, Compounded by Poor Safety Culture, in Virgin Galactic Crash, Washington Post, July 28, 2015. “At Blue Origin, our biggest”: Christian Davenport, “Jeff Bezos on Nuclear Reactors in Space, the Lack of Bacon

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Personal Spaceflight Federation’s Valentine’s Day meeting, 116 secrecy surrounding Goddard test, 166–168 turtle mascot ULA partnership, 208 “Very Big Brother” rocket, 223 Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane development, 269 See also Bezos, Jeff Bluebonnet Ordnance Plant, Texas, 30, 34 Boeing, 6, 52–53, 139–140, 209. See also United

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, 109–110 SpaceShipTwo crash, 214–215 training for space flight, 113 trans-Atlantic balloon flight, 101–104 Virgin Atlantic, 104–106 See also SpaceShipOne; SpaceShipTwo; Virgin Galactic Breaux, John, 50 Brevard County Emergency Operations Center, 227 Broadwater, John, 192 Bruno, Tory, 207, 241 Brunson, Doyle, 28–29 bull whip, 22–23

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270 Apollo 1, 121 Falcon 1 rocket, 134–136 Falcon 9 rocket, 203–204, 217–220 SpaceShipOne, 82–84 SpaceShipTwo, 212–216 SpaceX, 239–241 Virgin Galactic ship, 230–232 F-1 engines. See Saturn V rocket FALCON (Force Application and Launch from CONUS), 127–129 Falcon 1 rocket, 5 crash, 134

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University, 67–71 prison break (New Mexico), 11, 16–17 private space programs, 32–33. See also Beal Aerospace; Blue Origin; SpaceX; United Launch Alliance; Virgin Galactic Propulsion Module 2, 168–169 Purdue University, 249–250 railgun technology, 23 rapid unscheduled disassembly (RUD), 203 Rather, Dan, 68 real estate market: Andy Beal

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252 space race, early, 235 ‘space’ versus ‘orbit,’ 224–225 spaceplane development, 79–80, 269. See also SpaceShipOne; SpaceShipTwo Spaceport America, 211–212, 232 SpaceShipOne (Virgin Galactic), 5, 265 Branson’s purchase of, 92 crash on landing, 82–83 creation of, 107–108 design and flight trajectory, 80–81 fourth test flight

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Allen’s anxiety over manned flight, 91–92 pilots, 81–83, 86–87 retirement, 116 Rutan-Allen collaboration, 85 third test flight, 94–95 SpaceShipTwo (Virgin Galactic), 6–7, 97, 108–109, 212–216, 230–233, 269 SpaceX booster recovery and reusability, 198–199 booster rocket trial, 22 conflict over DoD contract

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115–119 Van Horn Advocate, 20–21, 25 Vandenberg Air Force Base, 48, 130–131 vertical landings, 224 Virgin Atlantic, 104–106 Virgin Cola, 106 Virgin Galactic competition from Blue Origin, 256 creation of, 106–108 creation of SpaceShipOne, 107–108 customer support for space travel, 111–113 Personal Spaceflight Federation’s

Space 2.0

by Rod Pyle  · 2 Jan 2019  · 352pp  · 87,930 words

the most exciting time to be alive since the moon missions of the late 1960s and early ’70s. But this complex new frontier of SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, space tourism, Mars cyclers, and asteroid mining is as different as could be from the Apollo era. In Space 2.0, ace science writer Rod

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end of 2019. Larger orbital rockets, the New Glenn and massive New Armstrong, are also being planned. The rockets and capsules will be reusable. UNITY Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s space tourism start-up, is test flying its suborbital rocketplane and plans to be flying tourists by 2019 or 2020. The rocketplane

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. The early Mercury missions and the X-15 rocketplane flights were suborbital. In the immediate future, suborbital trajectories will be primarily useful for space tourists. Virgin Galactic’s and Blue Origin’s tourist flights will be suborbital. •Low Earth Orbit (LEO): Orbits that range from 100 to 1,200 miles above Earth

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of metal buildings surrounding a modern control tower. Mojave Airport serves as a hub for business activity for the region, and within its confines stands Virgin Galactic, where billionaire Richard Branson is slowly realizing his spaceflight dream. Branson has been working on a plan to democratize space tourism since 2004; he has

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Florida and Texas. Just a few miles down the road at Edwards Air Force Base, the X-15 tore up the skies in the 1960s. Virgin Galactic seems infused with that pioneering spirit. I park in a half-empty lot and enter for a tour of the plant. Inside

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, Virgin Galactic is all business, with little effort wasted on glitz. The double doors swing open and I am greeted with the smells of a classic machine

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NASA facilities, this looks almost casual—just a couple dozen workers on any given shift, enthusiastically fabricating the future. Virgin Galactic’s Mojave facility. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/Ed Parsons The author inside Virgin Galactic’s fabrication and assembly facility, in front of the carrier airplane Eve. This twin-fuselage jet carries Virgin’s

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all around, and the crew moves on to their monitors to evaluate the test data. It’s a moment of muted excitement and welcome progress. Virgin Galactic is behind schedule—the initial passenger flight was supposed to take place in 2009—so progress is critical. Virgin’s approach to launch is unique

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attached, is carried to altitude by a USAF B-52 bomber before dropping free and igniting its rocket engine. Virgin Galactic’s rocketplane operates in a similar fashion. Image credit: US Air Force Virgin Galactic’s plans to carry paying passengers have been consistently delayed. In a ground test in 2007, a rocket engine

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been getting the thermal protection on Unity right. Despite being a suborbital rocketplane, it still encounters high temperatures during its descent back into the atmosphere. Virgin Galactic’s newest rocketplane, Unity, mated to its carrier plane Eve, at its first rollout. While it does not return at orbital speeds, Unity still needs

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extensive thermal protection to survive the high temperatures of reentering the atmosphere. Image credit: Virgin Galactic/Mark Greenberg Virgin Galactic’s history is indicative of the perils facing spaceflight entrepreneurs. In 2008, despite the accident, Branson projected that tourist flights would begin by the

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only intermittent testing occurring. Clearly, creating a space-tourist business was harder than Branson, or any of the others working in the field, had foreseen. Virgin Galactic hired a new chief executive named George T. Whitesides in 2010. Whitesides is a veteran of other spaceflight activities, including a brief stint as chief

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in materials science and nanotechnology, so science and tech run in the family. Virgin Galactic’s founder, Richard Branson, greets the press at the rollout of Unity. Image credit: Virgin Galactic George Whitesides, president of Virgin Galactic. Image credit: Virgin Galactic Once Whitesides settled in at Virgin Galactic, he “adjusted how they did business,” as he put it in an

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in granting operational waivers and exceptions for experimental flights. The report then provided a summarizing statement that might best describe why entrepreneurial efforts, such as Virgin Galactic’s, take longer than anticipated: “Manned commercial spaceflight is a new frontier, with many unknown risks and hazards. In such an environment, safety margins around

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meticulously seek out and mitigate known hazards, as a prerequisite to identifying and mitigating new hazards.” This second accident, after the 2007 engine explosion, shook Virgin Galactic to its core and resulted in further strong and proactive steps to ensure future safety. More test flights were scheduled to ascertain that each system

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. He and his partners have been investing for almost two decades and have shown incredible tenacity in their continuing pursuit and development of tourist spaceflight. Virgin Galactic has moved on since the accident in 2014, and Unity is now engaged in an aggressive test-flight program. The company has also expanded its

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and other small payloads—with new systems that build on their unique technologies. The first 2018 test of Unity, Virgin’s new rocketplane. Image credit: Virgin Galactic This satellite-launching spin-off company, called Virgin Orbit, was initiated in 2015 with the opening of a separate facility in Long Beach, California. The

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to launch altitude by a converted Boeing 747, much as Unity is carried to altitude by Eve. I spoke to George Whitesides at length about Virgin Galactic’s plans and the trials before them. “Space is a challenging technical endeavor and it is very unforgiving given the current technology,” he said. “We

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create and insure it, but nobody will perish. But launching satellites is also a business with more current and potential competition than space tourism. Today, Virgin Galactic’s only real rival to carry civilians into space is Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, which is also building and testing spacecraft that will shuttle

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will need to move aggressively to stake its claim in this marketplace. Unity’s rocket engine firing during its first powered test flight. Image credit: Virgin Galactic Virgin Orbit’s biggest current rival is Orbital ATK, a company that has been operating in the air-launched “smallsat” business for almost thirty years

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10,000 pounds, or clusters of hundreds of smallsats. The company is owned by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, who hired Burt Rutan after he left Virgin Galactic, and also operates out of Mojave. Stratolaunch will use a huge carrier plane, like the Virgin LauncherOne concept, but built with advanced lightweight composites, to

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. (All these launch systems will be quoted to low Earth orbit.) Firefly’s two founders previously held positions at other space companies—in this case, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and SpaceX. Firefly began operations in Hawthorne, California, in 2014, and has since moved to Texas. Rocket Lab was founded in 2006 and

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a truly mammoth scale—the first of its kind anywhere. It’s hard to describe exactly what makes SpaceX’s main plant so special. Where Virgin Galactic is a small shop slowly crafting a handful of spacecraft, SpaceX is vast—somewhere around a million square feet in size—with more than 5

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primarily on building and testing one suborbital rocket, the New Shepard (named after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard). Blue Origin’s initial goal was more like Virgin Galactic’s: suborbital tourism. In this case, instead of a rocketplane with wings, it uses a more traditional capsule design on a fully reusable rocket. The

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unique and most of the large space-related commercial space enterprises are located there. But foreign investment is on the rise. In 2017, for example, Virgin Galactic announced a deal to receive a billion dollars from Saudi Arabia, adding to the hundreds of millions it has already raised in the Middle East

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combination of what companies and national entities are planning, tempered by finances, technical challenges, and politics. SUBORBITAL FLIGHT: 2018–2022 •Space Tourism: Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic both operate suborbital flights for tourists and scientific payloads by 2020. A number of small companies provide suborbital launches for short-duration robotic experiments. EARTH

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-the-new-final-frontier. 82“Space Investment Quarterly, Q4, 2017.” Space Angels Holdings, January 18, 2018. 83Masunaga, Samantha. “Saudi Arabia to invest $1 billion in Virgin Galactic.” Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2017. 84Interview with the author, September 2016. 85Miller, Charles. “Affording a Return to the Moon by Leveraging Commercial Partnerships.” Next

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Blue Origin, 135–136, 136, 140–141, 236 future visions for Earth, 35–36 and international space agencies, 181 as space investor, 151, 154 and Virgin Galactic, 101–102 Bigelow, Robert, 54 Bigelow Aerospace, 246 Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), 54, 54 Bigelow expandable modules, 247 Bigelow habitation module, 237 Bigelow test

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, 51, 137 and new space race, 135–141 pilot space settlements by, 248 public support of, 252 and reusability, 186, 197, 204 as rival to Virgin Galactic, 101–102 rockets of, 55 suborbital test flights from, 127 for tourist flights, 59, 245 and United Launch Alliance, 187–188 Boeing commercial space provider

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In Space, Inc., 106–107 NanoRacks, 105, 106 Planet Labs, 106 Rocket Lab, 103–104 and space settlements, 236 Stratolaunch, 102 Vector Space Systems, 104 Virgin Galactic, 93–101 Virgin Orbit, 100–102 George Whitesides, 97, 98, 100–102 space exploration, 25–36, 234 Space Exploration, Development, and Settlement Act (2016), 238

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factory, 122, 122–124, 126, 159, 256 satellites launched by, 102 Gwynne Shotwell and, 124–126 Tesla roadster, 261 United Launch Alliance vs., 142–145 Virgin Galactic vs., 121 Spudis, Paul, 233 Sputnik, 40, 40, 183, 191 SSI (Space Services Incorporated), 152, 153, 154 SSL (Space Systems/Loral), 179 Stafford, Tom, 166

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Zyl, Jakob, 34, 198 Vector Space Systems, 104, 104 Venera probes, 183–184 Venus, 20, 21, 177, 183–184, 184 Viking 1 spacecraft, 46, 250 Virgin Galactic, 95–98 in Mojave Airport, 94–95 and Saudi Arabia, 155 SpaceX vs., 121 tourist flights offered by, 59, 245 Unity and, 51, 100, 100

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight

by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom and Charles D. Walker  · 1 Jun 2011  · 376pp  · 110,796 words

Maryniak Doug Messier Anita Miller John Moltzan John Oelerich Robert Pearlman Carol Perry Fell Peters Dan Slater Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Dean Truax Scott Truax Virgin Galactic Per Wimmer X PRIZE Foundation Special thanks to Eric Dahlstrom, whose interviewing, writing, and editing skills, along with his extensive knowledge about space, played

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of Brian Feeney. i 26. Burt Rutan, chief designer and founder of Scaled Composites, holds a model of SpaceShipOne. Photograph by Mark Greenberg, courtesy of Virgin Galactic. 27. SpaceShipOne attached to White Knight prior to its first suborbital flight over Mojave, California. Courtesy of Scaled Composites. 28. Mission control at Scaled Composites

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successful suborbital flight. Courtesy of Robert Pearlman, collectsnncE.com. 30. Brian Binnie and Mike Melvill in front of SpaceShipOne. Photograph by Mike Mills, courtesy of Virgin Galactic. 31. Ansari X PRIZE successful flight celebration. Courtesy of Paiwei Wei. 32. Per Wimmer with models ofWhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo in front of the Museum of

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ofWimmerSpace.com. 33. Top left: Sir Richard Branson standing beside SpaceShipOne on its maiden suborbital flight, as June 2004. Photograph by Mark Greenberg, courtesy of Virgin Galactic. 34. Bottom left: Sir Richard Branson (left) with Burt Rutan during the rollout of WhiteKnightTwo, Mojave, California. Photograph by Mark Greenberg, courtesy of

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Virgin Galactic. 35. Above: Eton Musk in front of Falcon 9 engines at the SpaceX launch site, Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida

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, 8 January 2009. Courtesy of SpaceX. 36. Above: Spaceport America concept design for a new spaceport being developed for Virgin Galactic in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Spaceport America Conceptual Images oxs/Foster + Partners. 37. Top right:The Russian-Ukrainian-American launch team, including Michael Gold, Bigelow

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Branson in front of WhiteKnightTwo, named VMS Eve (in honor of his mother), before its maiden flight, Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Photograph by Mark Greenberg, courtesy of Virgin Galactic. 40. Sir Richard Branson (left) and Burt Rutan with VMS Eve and vss Enterprise in the background on the eve of the rollout, 6 December

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zoo9. Photograph by Mark Greenberg, courtesy of Virgin Galactic. Shuttleworth also helped to change the tone of the space experience. The value of ordinary people sharing their experiences and excitement about space had been

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and slapped Burt Rutan on the back. The gestures confirmed the handoff from the spaceship development program, financed by Allen, to the commercial spaceline project, Virgin Galactic, to be created by Branson. The age of commercial spaceflight was poised to begin. On the one-year anniversary of winning the x PRIZE flight

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were Allen and Rutan. Rutan had chosen to display the spaceship in its original state after the zi June maiden suborbital flight, stripped of its Virgin Galactic and sponsorship logos, with a crumpled fuselage showing the technical difficulties Melvill had encountered on the historic flight. The markings on the plane and the

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Sir Richard Branson, billionaire owner of the Virgin Group, stood beside Burt Rutan to announce that he was starting a new business, a spaceline named Virgin Galactic that would offer suborbital spaceflights for $190,000 per ticket. It was a bold plan from a man who had built a career out of

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of thousands more. If it was a success, Branson planned to move into orbital flights and possibly even an orbiting space hotel. For their money, Virgin Galactic flyers would get a three-day space experience: medical tests, a trip debriefing, and time in a simulator on day one; a White Knight flight

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autobiography, space flight still "seemed like an impossible dream." However, as the x PRIZE competition built momentum and garnered worldwide interest, Whitehorn eventually registered the Virgin Galactic name and started looking into the teams vying for the prize. So, when Whitehorn came upon a spaceship in Scaled Composites's hangar in 2003

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projects, including GlobalFlyer and Virgin Trains. He was given the task of finding financing and convincing the investment committee of the Virgin Group to back Virgin Galactic. The committee challenged him to first find $to million in deposits to prove there was a market. That requirement was met within nine months,

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the ground. In zooz Collier left the United Kingdom behind and emigrated to New Zealand. He was working for House of Travel near Christchurch when Virgin Galactic unveiled its worldwide invitation in zoo6 for accredited spaceflight agents, or AsAS, as part of a global network of travel agents to sell their suborbital

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New Zealand who can make that claim-gave House of Travel the competitive edge over other agencies. They essentially used his profile to win the Virgin Galactic appointment. Virgin Galactic conducted a one-day, intensive training in January 2007 for ten House of Travel agents, representing different regions of New Zealand. As Collier recalled

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States, near Philadelphia, something that Collier hasn't yet undertaken because of the large expense of traveling from New Zealand. Collier came away from the Virgin Galactic training course very enthusiastic. He was pleased that a big global brand was at the forefront of all this. "It's going to happen. It

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on commercial aviation? I'm thrilled at the idea of getting on the plane in Christchurch and being in London in two hours!" Two of Virgin Galactic's booked clients were part of the ten New Zealand assns. Since then, House of Travel has signed two more, for a total of four

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clients," Collier notes. For a nation of adventurers, explorers, and innovators, New Zealanders are just the type of people that suborbital flight would appeal to. Virgin Galactic started taking reservations in 2005, shortly after the x PRIZE launches. Unlike its predecessors, which were strapped for cash to market suborbital flights, Virgin benefits

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categories include Pioneers and Voyagers. Pioneers pay a deposit of $100,000 to $175,000 and are expected to fly within the first year of Virgin Galactic's operations. Voyagers, who pay $zo,ooo deposits, will follow the Pioneers, estimated to be after one thousand seats have gone up. Since 2005,

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public interest in spaceflight has increased dramatically. Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson became familiar names, synonymous with space tourism. Virgin began to get reservations from a mix of professionals serious about space and about

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Hidalgo was a member of Peter Diamandis's team, managing special operations for the x PRIZE launches in Mojave, when she heard about Branson's Virgin Galactic announcement. Thrilled by the prospect of spaceflight since she was a kid, she could not have been more ecstatic. "After Branson announced it and

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a lot more attainable and real." Little did she know at the time that within a few months, she would have a reservation on a Virgin Galactic flight. Hidalgo is part of a new generation of young professionals from the postApollo era whose enthusiasm and high energy kick-started a resurgence in

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some NSS stuff. When he came back, in fact, he had been talking to them about the potential of being the first honeymoon couple for Virgin Galactic." It was definitely not what Hidalgo had been expecting. On a trip to New York two months later, George proposed to Hidalgo during a visit

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installation, a controversial vinyl and nylon work of art by Christo and JeanneClaude. Specific terms for the first honeymoon couple in space were crafted with Virgin Galactic over several months, and the agreement was signed on Iz April 2005. The official announcement of their plans took place at the Experimental Aircraft Association

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Branson in front of about five thousand people. They both received their Queen's jeweler's Founder's design pins at the event. "Being a Virgin Galactic Founder has been amazing," Hidalgo notes. "The plan is to have a raffle for Founders (to determine their place in line). Everyone has an

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same excitement as the first. It makes us all first among equals. We're all Founders." Founders would also serve as glorified guinea pigs. Until Virgin Galactic came along, no one had ever prepared a group of ordinary citizens, an eclectic mix of luxury tourists, for spaceflight. About seventy-seven Founders underwent

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. It made the Founders feel a part of the process of development, helping to shape the program as it moved toward commercial viability. Being a Virgin Galactic Founder certainly has its privileges. "We got our Puma-sponsored flight suits and Puma shoes," Hidalgo explains. "Definitely makes you feel like a sports

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hero." Hidalgo and Whitesides have attended five of Virgin Galactic's events, including being flown on a chartered jet to witness WhiteKnightTwo's unveiling in Mojave. They have hobnobbed like movie stars in the Hollywood

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was skeptical. Interviews were tough, because people like Wimmer were considered either dreamers or lunatics. Today, with private orbital flights scheduled twice annually, and with Virgin Galactic's marketing empire promoting Rutan's hardware development, things have changed. There's more a fascination with "the hows and the whys" than speculation over

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is possible or not. Currently, Wimmer typically gives two or three media interviews per week. "The interest is definitely there and is not going away." Virgin Galactic finally caught up with Wimmer in 2007. Virgin was looking for more Founders with certain kinds of profiles, hoping to increase the geographic spread of

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well prepared for the actual trip." Part of that preparation also included a rigorous medical screening that nearly cost him his shot at space. Each Virgin Galactic Founder is required to submit a full medical report on their current health status. Unfortunately for Wimmer, a blip on his EGG concerned Virgin's

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Brian Singer, and designer Philippe Starck. Starck was commissioned by Branson to put his unique stamp on Virgin's space business. First he created the Virgin Galactic logo, which prominently features Branson's own eyeball. Then he designed part of SpaceShipTwo's interior and the spaceport that will be the center of

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up for grabs for a minimum deposit of $20,000. John Criswick did just that and became the first Canadian to book a flight with Virgin Galactic. Criswick was not new to the space industry. He spent most of his early years dreaming of becoming a Canadian astronaut. After earning degrees in

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qualification of instruments and equipment is another market that could easily be served by SpaceShipTwo flights. For the unveiling of WhiteKnightTwo on z8 July zoo8, Virgin Galactic flew a group of Founders from Los Angeles to Mojave Airport on a new Virgin Airlines Airbus. The nose of the Airbus was painted with

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the message, "My other Ride is a Spaceship." The Founders witnessed the fanfare as Rutan and Branson, wearing matching white shirts with prominent Virgin Galactic logos, waved to the crowd from WhiteKnightTwo's cockpit windows. They taxied the plane in front of Scaled Composites's hangar, where the vii' guests

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highly anticipated commercial flights for Virgin's Founders belongs to another spaceport on the rise, deep in the New Mexico desert. On 31 December zoo8 Virgin Galactic signed a twenty-year lease with the state of New Mexico, planting its base of operation and global headquarters in Spaceport America, the first purpose

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Racing League, have signed agreements to take up residence at the Spaceport. This would require separate buildup schedules for vertical launch and manufacturing facilities from Virgin Galactic's terminal. Although initially dedicated to a purely space tourism business model, Spaceport America plans to expand its operations to partner with the U. S

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lucrative than sending tourists into space. With that purpose in mind, Spaceport America has signed a partnership with Spaceport Sweden, another spaceport hub, for future Virgin Galactic flights. The sister spaceport relationship is a natural collaboration for establishing transcontinental suborbital landing ports for Virgin's future global spaceport infrastructure. A spaceport in

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the FAA. If this happens, "then there would be no other choice but to operate this business outside of Europe," Lentsch concludes. It would affect Virgin Galactic flight plans at Spaceport Sweden or Scotland, or any other spaceport in Europe. Lentsch is hopeful that this attitude will change once a more thorough

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he remains cautious over the notion of spaceflight as a "joy ride." Although he was one of the first to buy a suborbital ticket from Virgin Galactic and thinks "it's cool," he doesn't foresee suborbital flight as a means to an end. "It's not a stepping stone," he

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about our "moral imperative" to open up the space frontier to achieve "planetary redundancy, to back up the biosphere," It is not unusual to hear Virgin Galactic's Will Whitehorn speak in O'Neillian terms of space as mankind's destiny. "Man has to go to space. It's not about the

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marketing vision, something more akin to Hollywood than to Mojave: klieg lights, young starlets, free champagne, Scaled Composites engineers being introduced as "rock stars," and Virgin Galactic's future astronauts dressed in black designer Puma jackets with "ss2 Unveil" logos. It was a glitzy wrapup to the past six years. Back in

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the vehicles that will actually take paying customers to space. In two years or three, when flight testing is complete, Scaled Composites will fill out Virgin Galactic's fleet of commercial, passenger-carrying spaceships with four more SpaceShipTwos. Rutan is predicting that forty or fifty spacecraft will eventually be needed to meet

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Isaac. "The Cruise and I." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1973. The Next Frontier?" National Geographic, July 1976. Belfiore, Michael. "Live Coverage: Virgin Galactic Unveils SpaceShipTwo." Wired Blog Network, 23 January zoo8. http://blog.wired.com/wired science /zoos / of/spaceshiptwo-un. html. Bohlen, Celestine. "Russian Astronauts Plead with

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site. http://www.orbspace.com. Orphans ofApollo. Motion picture. Michael Potter (producer), Becky Neiman and Michael Potter (directors). Free Radical Productions, USA, zoo8. Palermo, Enrico. Virgin Galactic presentation. FAA AST Conference, 6 February 2009. Peters, Fell. Letter from Gerald Bruce Levin, University of Southern California, Department of Finance and Business Economics, 17

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership

by Richard Branson  · 8 Sep 2014  · 315pp  · 99,065 words

it! From my very first commercial venture at age sixteen with Student magazine, right up to today’s far loftier adventures with such things as Virgin Galactic and space tourism, I have always had one paramount philosophy: if a new project or business opportunity doesn’t excite me and get my entrepreneurial

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to express my thoughts to a group of people I find constant interruptions really exasperating. I have tremendous admiration for our CEO and president at Virgin Galactic George Whiteside’s uncanny ability to handle interruptions. Perhaps he learned the art in his previous position as chief of staff at NASA where he

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way as today’s kids might use the wonderful Toy Story character Buzz Lightyear’s mantra of ‘To Infinity and Beyond!’ Something I know the Virgin Galactic crew think is really pretty cool. A few years later, at Stowe School, I came across my second mission statement of sorts in the school

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sales started life as X.com and soon morphed into PayPal. His other current major dream coming true is SpaceX, which, along similar lines to Virgin Galactic, is developing a private sector satellite launch vehicle to take over where NASA left off. There is even talk of Musk merging his PayPal and

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, and just in case you are wondering, as many did at the time we first broke the news, I should make it absolutely clear that Virgin Galactic is very much for real – if you care to check you will see the first announcement in 2004 was not made on 1 April. If

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back our one 747 after a year if things weren’t working out as we hoped. To this day, with giant, capital-intensive ventures like Virgin Galactic and our newly announced Virgin Cruises, we always spend a lot of time in finding inventive ways to mitigate the downside. If you have the

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recent years and he has relished the design challenges of introducing the same but extremely disparate sizzle to an altogether different space – pun intended. With Virgin Galactic, as with all our other businesses, one of my key roles has always been to continuously stir the pot by objectively listening to feedback and

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Way giving our people the freedom to express themselves by letting their imaginations take flight. At every stop along the way, from Student magazine to Virgin Galactic and everything in between, we have certainly enjoyed great times together and laughed a lot – quite often at my expense, as with my night locked

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Virgin Blue, see Virgin Australia Virgin Bride 329 Virgin Cola 58–9, 304–7, 329 Virgin Cruises 333 Virgin Digital 127 Virgin Express 243–4 Virgin Galactic 40, 103, 247, 270, 333, 371–2 Virgin Group: airlines owned by 22, 62, 257; see also individual airlines corporate culture adopted by, beginnings of

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race

by Tim Fernholz  · 20 Mar 2018  · 328pp  · 96,141 words

Company (TSC). TSC would build a larger, improved version of the vehicle for regular passenger flights. And to that end he launched a new brand, Virgin Galactic. He envisioned daily operations, where seven space tourists would climb aboard the craft, travel to the edge of space, and enjoy a few minutes of

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and incredible views before coming back down for a landing. Never one to miss an opportunity for the limelight, Branson began drumming up business for Virgin Galactic with gusto. He sold tickets to space for $250,000 a seat, which he bought for himself and his family and then hawked to celebrities

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like a fairly trivial engineering problem. It was 2004, and the space age that Americans had been promised for decades finally seemed within grasp. When Virgin Galactic was unveiled, Musk’s SpaceX was still just a few years old, barely more than a group of enthusiasts. They were still planning a test

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he doesn’t like to be forgotten. Yet, for all the attention they garnered, the splashy unveilings from both Branson and Bezos came to naught. Virgin Galactic’s first flight kept being pushed further and further into the future. The same eccentricities that made Rutan the right person to hand-build an

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engineers and working on closely held projects. “Good people would disappear, for years, and you’d have no idea what they were working on,” one Virgin Galactic executive told me of the Blue Origin operation. It was a rarity in the close-knit aerospace industry, where ostensible rivals frequently wind up as

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obtaining surplus Soviet rockets. Just out of school, BlastOff’s marketing manager, George Whitesides, would later be the NASA chief of staff and CEO of Virgin Galactic. One engineer, Chris Lewicki, would go on to spend a decade at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab before founding the space mining company Planetary Resources

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make suborbital passenger transit a reality—rocketing off from Los Angeles and gliding into London Heathrow three hours later instead of twelve. He called it Virgin Galactic. As for Musk, he had invested some money in the contest itself, as part of his agenda of keeping the public eye on space projects

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Origin and SpaceX, lands after a 1996 test flight. Courtesy of NASA Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, goes through a glide test in 2016. ©Virgin Galactic VSS Unity flies over the Mojave Desert while slung underneath its carrier aircraft. © Virgin Galactic This diagram showing how to land a rocket on a barge at sea

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a lift up to the International Space Station. And they would have to compete for mind space with the boisterous marketing of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. At first, this bolstered the concept’s credibility, but as years passed without any of Galactic’s ticket holders actually getting into space, the idea

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considered far more vital to the company’s future: reusing its rockets. Since Richard Branson launched Virgin Galactic, in 2005, it had struggled to deliver on the commercial promise of the X Prize and SpaceShipOne. Virgin Galactic was partially inspired by Branson’s experience in the airline business, which began in 1984 when his

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and marketing campaign, but the planes were the same jets that everyone bought from Boeing and Airbus. He sought to follow the same model with Virgin Galactic, but the market for SpaceShipOne had so far been limited to Paul Allen and the X Prize. To obtain both a mother ship and a

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created a joint venture with Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, called the Spaceship Company (TSC). It would be dedicated to building the flight hardware that Virgin Galactic—and perhaps, in time, other “spacelines”—would market and operate. In practice, this meant that Rutan’s Scaled Composites team was working on the hardware

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descendants of Chuck Yeager and the other rocket plane pilots who came before them, pushing the envelope in an effort to reach the stars. At Virgin Galactic, heavy hearts concluded that the best tribute to Alsbury would be pressing on with the project. Outside the company, critics laid into Branson’s overoptimistic

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out Scaled’s share of their joint venture, the Space Company. Now there would be a clear chain of command, with test pilots dedicated to Virgin Galactic’s projects only, not shared among multiple new vehicles. The next SpaceShipTwo, already under construction, would be carefully reexamined for the “human factors” that had

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program had overtaken the work of the rocket plane test pilots in the 1960s, vertical-launching rocket companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin had stolen Virgin Galactic’s thunder. The X Prize win that had catalyzed the company seemed as distant as the idea of a spaceline carrying paying passengers around the

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world. Jeff Bezos’s space company was even older than Virgin Galactic, but his tight-lipped approach protected him from accusations of exaggeration. Yet something—whether it was competitive instincts, the challenge of recruiting the best talent

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through Virgin Group and joining its board. The deal also entailed a contract to launch ten of the satellites on Virgin Orbit, a subsidiary of Virgin Galactic that would be spun out in 2017. Virgin Orbit intended to build the architecture to launch small satellites on rockets dropped at high altitude from

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begin flying test pilots and then human passengers in 2018. It hasn’t shared the price of admission, but if it can become operational before Virgin Galactic, Branson’s rocket company may find itself in trouble. Bezos is passionate about bringing people into space for just a taste of microgravity and a

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of them to spend $10 million each on space vacations, that’s $100 billion.” He expects suborbital tickets to fall from the current market level—Virgin Galactic’s $250,000-a-seat ride—to just $30,000 to $50,000 per person within five years. He predicts orbital tourism will be $3

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, NASA issued new contracts to SpaceX, Orbital, and Sierra Nevada for cargo missions to the station through the end of its life. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are expected to begin crewed test flights of their suborbital spacecraft, New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo. Their goal of providing regular and safe recreational space tourism

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, “In-Flight Breakup During Test Flight Scaled Composites SpaceShipTwo, N339SS,” Public Meeting of July 28, 2015. the vehicle’s rocket engines: Andy Pasztor, “Problems Plagued Virgin Galactic Rocket Ship Long Before Crash,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2014. “has to be stick-and-rudder”: Ian Parker, “The X Prize: Competing in the

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, x, 4, 127 test stand, 169 Van Horn Advocate, 4 Vector Space, 235 vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), 15–16, 125–27, 217, 238–39 Virgin Galactic, 7–8, 97, 127, 210, 213–14, 234–35 crewed test flights, 252 Virgin Group, 5 Vulcan, 190–91 W; Walker, Charlie, 53 Wallops Flight

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exclusive access to top executives at SpaceX, including Elon Musk himself, as well as at Blue Origin, NASA, Boeing, United Launch Alliance, Orbital ATK, and Virgin Galactic. Fernholz lives in Brooklyn, New York. Connect with HMH on Social Media Follow us for book news, reviews, author updates, exclusive content, giveaways, and more

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!

by Joseph N. Pelton  · 5 Nov 2016  · 321pp  · 89,109 words

Allen, co-founder of Microsoft; Elon Musk (founder of Space X, Paypal, and Tesla); Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites; Sir Richard Branson, head of Virgin Galactic; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; and electronic game inventor John Carmack, who created “Doom” and “Quake.” It is these people that are upending the world

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growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just—there. No oil.”(Elon Musk, president of SpaceX and Tesla.) On his space business, Virgin Galactic: We'll go into orbit. We'll go to the Moon. This business has no limits. (Richard Branson, reported in Wired magazine January 2005.) On

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is not alone in his thinking. From the list of “visionaries” quoted earlier, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX; Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic; and Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and the man who financed SpaceShipOne, the world’s first successful spaceplane have all said the future

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New Space industry are busy designing solar power satellites that can bring us clean and abundant energy from outer space. Others at SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, Blue Origin, British Aerospace, XCOR Aerospace, Orbital Sciences ATK, Kelly Space and Technology, Swiss Spaceplane Systems, Reaction Engines Ltd, Stratolauncher, etc., are

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to all this is new commercial transportation systems offering lower and lower costs for access to space. Elon Musk at SpaceX, Sir Richard Branson at Virgin Galactic and Paul Allen, providing the backing to build the first spaceplane and the giant Stratolauncher, are just three examples of space billionaires creating the new

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clean, plentiful and pervasive. Elon Musk sees a million people living on a space colony on Mars. Sir Richard Branson named his space transportation company Virgin Galactic because he truly thinks not only outside the box but outside the “circle” that is Earth. If you want to image the full scope of

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.) The objective is to churn out these small satellites like video cassette recorders or television sets and then quickly launch them at low cost via Virgin Galactic (Launcher One) and SpaceX (Falcon 9) launchers. These are the new commercial launcher systems backed by space billionaires Sir Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Who

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those in the space business, the names that are out there today were unfamiliar in the year 2000. The New Space transportation revolutionaries include SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Launcher One, Sierra Nevada, XCOR, Rocket Lab, S-3, Reaction Engines, Blue Origin and quite a few more. These radical new companies are pioneering

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rush. The New Players in Space Transportation As we have already explained New Space transportation capabilities are sprouting up everywhere. Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) , Virgin Galactic, and now Blue Origin are all headed by space billionaires . These New Space titans draw a flock of news reporters like honey attracts a greedy

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that was to carry a resupply mission to the International Space Station [1]. Three days later there was the Oct. 31, 2014, crash of the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, due to pilot error. Rick N. Tumlinson, Chairman of Deep Space Industries, said in response to the SpaceShipTwo crash he was relieved about the

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may be fewer people willing to pay a king’s ransom of over $50 million to fly to the space station could be the pending Virgin Galactic flights at much lower fares. Apparently notables such as Tom Hanks, Justin Bieber, and Victoria Principle have signed up with Branson’s company for a

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ticket price of $200,000 that has now escalated to $250,000. It is noteworthy that well over 500 people have booked for flights on Virgin Galactic and that the number of the bookings well exceeds the total number of all astronauts from all countries around the world that have ever flown

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flights represent a “cheap option” for those who cannot pay a quarter of a million dollars to fly with Virgin Galactic (Image courtesy of Zero Gravity Corporation.) Yet another alternative to flying on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is to sign up to fly in a Russian Foxbat jet up into the stratosphere where one

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, External Engines, Ltd. and Bristol Spaceplanes in the United Kingdom, Air Bus-Astrium, QSST, and Lockheed. These development programs are in addition to XCOR and Virgin Galactic and their spaceplane development. Many of these projects are targeted at transportation needs rather than space tourism flights. This is simply because this is where

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systems have in mind to extend the capabilities they have developed for suborbital flights to create at least the ability to launch small satellit es. Virgin Galactic has entered into contracts with OneWeb, the mega-LEO communications satellite constellation , to use its Launcher One system to boost 125-kg small satellites into

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. Another contract, valued at $5.5 million, went to Firefly Space Systems of Cedar Park, Texas. The final contract of $4.7 million went to Virgin Galactic LLC of Long Beach, California, for Launcher One launches. These NASA contracts were awarded under fixed-price “Venture Class Launch Services” (VCLS) contracts. However, most

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space tourism, is it small satellite launches, or is it hypersonic transport? Currently the developers are trying to straddle all three possibilities. In addition to Virgin Galactic, which has the lead in the space adventures market, there could be others that are developing spaceplanes, including and XCOR. Then there is Skylon, which

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missions to Mars others people listen. New start-ups such as Rocket Labs USA, Firefly, Blue Origin’s New Shepherd, Space Swiss Systems, and even Virgin Galactic’s Launcher One also all hold out the promise of lower cost and reliable space launch capacity. They, too, must be taken seriously. Clearly launch

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for the money in their annual budgets, but private aerospace companies and especially start-up ventures such as Rocket Lab, Firefly, XCOR, and even SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Orbital ATK, External Engines and Bristol Space Planes often have to depend on space agency funding or very far-sighted angel investors such as Paul

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Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson have given us SpaceX and the Falcon 9 Heavy, Blue Origin and the New Shepherd launch system and Virgin Galactic the Launcher One, and these are just a few of the innovations that make space transport and orbital missions much more viable today. Arianespace is

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility

by Robert Zubrin  · 30 Apr 2019  · 452pp  · 126,310 words

stagnation in space launch and human spaceflight technology has come to an end. An entrepreneurial space race has erupted with players including Firefly, Vector Launch, Virgin Galactic, Stratolaunch, and, most important, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin—which will soon launch its own reusable New Glenn booster with similar capabilities to the Falcon

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Richard Branson, who adopted the concept and, with the addition of some truly serious money, has since been moving to commercialize it under the name Virgin Galactic as a system for suborbital space tourism. More recently, the late Paul Allen started his own company, called Stratolaunch, to commercialize a much larger version

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but spent $50 million to win it. Branson is spending hundreds of millions, and while it is possible he might someday see a profit from Virgin Galactic, he certainly knows plenty of better bets for making money. The same can be said for Allen and his Stratolaunch venture. In short, none of

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late 2018, the company received $70 million in investment. First launch is expected in 2020. Firefly was founded by Tom Markusic, a veteran of NASA, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and SpaceX. Designed to deliver one thousand kilograms to orbit, Firefly Alpha is a two-stage booster combining traditional LOX/kerosene propulsion with

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minutes of zero gravity and the same view of space that astronauts get. This would be a big plus for sales. In fact, companies like Virgin Galactic are currently offering four minutes of zero-gravity experience for $200,000, without transporting anyone anywhere, and getting a fair number of takers.2 By

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. If each passenger paid the $20,000 price of current global-distance first-class tickets (getting, in addition to fast global transportation, ten times the Virgin Galactic zero-gravity fun for one-tenth the price), a gross revenue of $4 million per flight could be obtained. That leaves plenty of room for

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the former BFR a Starship, while craft that engage in trips to the stars will be called “interstellar spaceships.” 2. Christian Davenport, “Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic Just Got Another Step Closer to Flying Tourists to Space,” Washington Post, May 29, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05

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/29/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-just-got-another-step-closer-to-flying-tourists-to-space/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e548415f3697 (accessed October 14, 2018). 3. Stefanie Waldek, “How to Become

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–23 water on, 221–22 “young Venus,” 222, 223 Verne, Jules, 318 Vesta (asteroid), 125, 130 Viking mission (NASA), 119, 153 Virgin Group, 29, 53 Virgin Galactic, 12, 29–30, 38, 42, 43 virtual reality allowing visits to space, 98–99 von Braun, Wernher, 296, 332 Von Neumann, John, 231 Voyager missions

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler  · 3 Feb 2015  · 368pp  · 96,825 words

$10 million Ansari XPRIZE with SpaceShipOne, Sir Richard Branson swooped in to license the winning technology, committing a quarter of a billion dollars to develop Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo—the commercial follow-up to SpaceShipOne.4 Next, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos committed over $100 million toward a secretive launch vehicle company called

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has been passionate about opening space for the past forty years; and Richard Branson licensed the winning technology resulting from the Ansari XPRIZE to create Virgin Galactic. All four exemplify the central idea in this book, exhibiting a commitment to bold that’s fierce, enduring, and masterfully executed. Equally important, each of

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. He founded a global empire, diversifying into everything from mobile telecommunications to trains to undersea exploration, wine distribution, fitness centers, health care clinics and, in Virgin Galactic, commercial space flight. According to the Forbes 2012 list of billionaires, Branson’s personal worth is roughly $4.6 billion.16 All in all, not

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’s risking his entire brand (Virgin) versus a singular company (Tesla), he manages to do this is a way that doesn’t jeopardize the empire. Virgin Galactic is a fantastic example. In October 2004, when Burt Rutan demonstrated the success of the three-passenger SpaceShipOne vehicle, winning the Ansari XPRIZE, Branson and

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’s style, in 2009, he was brilliantly able to offset that risk by bringing in Aabar, the Mideast investment fund, to purchase 32 percent of Virgin Galactic for $280 million.19 Then, two years later, Aabar increased their stake by 6 percent, committing an additional $110 million to fund small satellite launch

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capability.20 So, sure, Branson bet a huge amount on Virgin Galactic, but he then protected that investment and brought in an extra $390 million in working capital to ensure its success. Branson, it seems, isn’t

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first CEO and chairman. 4 For a nice breakdown of Branson’s space plans, see Elizabeth Howell, “Virgin Galactic: Richard Branson’s Space Tourism Company,” Space.com, December 20, 2012, http://www.space.com/18993-virgin-galactic.html. 5 See http://www.blueorigin.com. 6 Justine Bachman, “Elon Musk Wants SpaceX to Replace Russia

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It, Let’s Do It: Lessons in Life (Virgin Books, March 2006). 19 “Galactic Announces Partnership,” Virgin Galactic, July 2009, http://www.virgingalactic.com/news/item/galactic-anounces-partnership/. 20 Nour Malas, “Abu Dhabi’s Aabar boosts Virgin Galactic stake,” Market Watch, October 19, 2011, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/abu-dhabis-aabar-boosts

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-virgin-galactic-stake-2011-10-19. 21 Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides, “Google and Virgin Team Up to Spell ‘Virgle,’ ” Wired

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, Andrew, 160 Venter, J. Craig, 64, 65–66 Vicarious, 167, 295n video games, 38, 45, 117, 144 video surveillance, 43 Virgin Atlantic, 124, 125, 126 Virgin Galactic, 96–97, 115, 125, 127 Virgin Management group, 111, 127, 128 Virgin Music, 124, 125 voice recognition, 58 Voltaire, 275 Vor-Tek, 252–53 vWorker

Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos and the Trillion-Dollar Space Race

by Christian Davenport  · 6 Sep 2025  · 441pp  · 127,950 words

with Russia to build the International Lunar Research Station. JULY 2021: Richard Branson reaches space on a suborbital trip flown by his space tourism company, Virgin Galactic. Bezos follows suit nine days later. NOVEMBER 2022: NASA’s Space Launch System rocket launches the un-crewed Orion spacecraft around the moon in the

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the lunar lander contract, but he had yet to go to space himself. Bezos would also edge out Richard Branson, the billionaire British entrepreneur, whose Virgin Galactic had been referring to itself as the “world’s first commercial spaceline” as it also worked to fly tourists on suborbital space trips. Branson, who

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memoir. Going to space would be the ultimate adventure, although he and Bezos had different plans for getting there. Unlike a rocket that launched vertically, Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft, known as SpaceShipTwo, was tethered to the belly of a mothership and hoisted to some 40,000 feet. The two would separate, and

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. The vehicle would remain in space for a few minutes before falling back to Earth and gliding to a runway. To get to this point, Virgin Galactic had overcome a series of technical challenges, as well as a crash in 2014, when its spaceplane came apart in a harrowing accident that killed

…

to shut the company down. But in May 2021, it sent SpaceShipTwo to space for the third time, in a flight its CEO called “flawless.” Virgin Galactic had said it would do one more test flight, and then, finally, it would be Branson’s turn— probably sometime in the fall. In the

…

text from Branson’s press person. “Are you free?” she wrote. “Urgent update.” Branson was going to move his voyage up. He’d be on Virgin Galactic’s next test flight, scheduled for July 11, allowing him to beat Bezos by nine days. When my plane landed, I scurried to find a

…

way possible, he was tormenting Bezos. BLUE ORIGIN’S TEAM was livid. In our interview the next day, Smith told me he wished Branson and Virgin Galactic well and said, “We really sincerely hope they have a great safe flight.” But he couldn’t help but take a dig at his rivals

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it to space— not technically. The Air Force and Federal Aviation Administration awarded astronaut wings for pilots who had soared above fifty miles, the barrier Virgin Galactic was aiming to break. But another boundary stood at sixty-two miles, or 100 kilometers: the Kármán line, named for Theodore von Kármán, one of

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Air Sports Federation, a record-keeping organization, the Kármán line was where space began. Blue Origin agreed. Its passengers would fly past sixty-two miles; Virgin Galactic’s would not. “We are going to the internationally recognized boundary of space,” Smith said. “We’ve committed to that from day one. All of

…

, the reaction was harsh. “Space Tourism Rivalry Gets Extremely Petty Ahead of Branson’s Spaceflight,” read the headline in The Verge. Nicola Pecile, one of Virgin Galactic’s pilots, lashed out on Twitter. “Hey BO, we at VG are truly big supporters of your program too. But this pissing contest about the

…

to watch,” he wrote. Internally, many of Blue Origin’s employees were embarrassed. While many of them hated SpaceX and Musk, they didn’t view Virgin Galactic and Branson the same way. It was much more of a friendly competition, and many of the companies’ employees were friends. Branson largely ignored Blue

…

Bezos during an interview on CNBC, he couldn’t help but reply: “Jeff who?” MUSK, MEANWHILE, MADE a show of support. Two days before the Virgin Galactic flight, he tweeted at Branson that he would “see you there to wish you the best.” “Thanks for being so typically supportive and such a

…

his shoulders. The flight itself was anticlimactic. There was none of the thunder of a rocket launch. No fire shooting out of the booster. Instead, Virgin Galactic’s mothership took off from a runway, like any plane taking off at a commercial airport. When it got to about 40,000 feet, the

…

sky, a glimmer of sun reflecting off the silvery ship until it seemed to disappear. Off went Branson and the rest of the crew, all Virgin Galactic employees: Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs; Colin Bennett, the lead operations engineer; and Beth Moses, Virgin’s chief astronaut instructor. The pilots flew

…

,” he said. Always on-brand, he didn’t miss a chance to plug his company: “Having flown to space, I can see more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the spaceline for Earth.” Which is what Bezos wanted for Blue Origin too, of course. But after Branson’s flight, he offered an olive

…

such loose requirements and called for stricter regulation. But for now, going to space was something anyone could do. If they could afford it. Initially, Virgin Galactic charged some $250,000 per seat; when they went on-sale after Branson’s flight, it charged $450,000. Blue Origin executives thought the value

…

(Crown Business, 1998), p. 217. 266 a harrowing accident: Irene Klotz, “U.S. Investigators Blame Virgin Galactic Crash on Lax Pilot Training,” Reuters, July 28, 2015, https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/science/us-investigators-blame-virgin-galactic-crash-on-lax-pilot-training-idUSKCN0Q21YS/. 266 its CEO called “flawless”: Christian Davenport, “Richard Branson’s

…

Virgin Galactic Reports Reaching Space for the Third Time,” The Washington Post, May 22, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com

…

/technology/2021/05/22/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space-flight/. 266 “One good thing”: Davenport, “Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Reports Reaching Space for the Third Time.” 267 “I’ve been itching to go”: Christian Davenport, “Billionaires’ Race to Space

…

: Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson Now Set to Beat Blue Origin’s Bezos to Space,” The Washington Post, July 1, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/

…

Tourism Rivalry Gets Extremely Petty Ahead of Branson’s Spaceflight,” The Verge, July 9, 2021, https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/9/22570287/space-tourism-virgin-galactic-branson-blue-origin-bezos. 269 interview on CNBC: “Jeff Who?” https://x.com/CNBC/status/1410292775900401669. 269 “We made a pot of tea”: Nick Rufford

…

Auction? Be Sure to Read the Fine Print,” Space.com, May 19, 2021, https://www.space.com/blue-origin-space-tourist-auction-terms. 272 Initially, Virgin Galactic charged: Micah Maidenberg, “Virgin Galactic Spaceflight Tickets to Start at $450,000 a Seat,” Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles

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/virgin-galactic-space-flight-tickets-to-start-at-450-000-a-seat-11628262330. 272 $28 million: Christian Davenport, “A Seat to Fly with Jeff Bezos to Space

…

Turner, Michael, 75 Tyson, Neil deGrasse, 6 United Launch Alliance (ULA), 34, 60, 61–62, 63–65, 148, 280 United States’ space program. See NASA Virgin Galactic, 265–71, 272 Walker, Robert, 15 Waltz, Mike, 322 Wang Yaping, 323 Washington Post, 21–22, 32–33, 36, 163, 165–66, 217–19 Watkins

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