What do the following have in common? The French designer Philippe Starck,
Stephen Hawking, the former Dallas actress Victoria Principal, Brian Singer,
who directed the latest Superman movie, and James Lovelock, inventor of the
Gaia concept that the Earth functions as a single connected organism.
The answer is that all have paid £100,000 to be launched into space on the
first trips by Virgin Galactic. The 88-year-old Mr Lovelock is already the
oldest man in the world to have been spun in a centrifuge as preparation for
the journey, says Will Whitehorn, the president of Virgin Galactic, and
emerged looking as fit as when he went in. But is wheelchair-bound Professor
Hawking really fit for space? “We think there's a chance of carrying him,
yes,” he says.
This month, various aviation big-wigs and politicians, including Arnold
Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, will assemble in the Mojave
Desert for the unveiling of WhiteKnightTwo (WK2). This is the craft, known
as the mothership, that will launch SpaceShipTwo (SS2), the vessel that will
contain the space tourists. With a 140-ft single-piece wing, it will be the
largest carbon composite aircraft ever built.
SS2 will itself be wheeled out early next year. The two craft will enter an
intensive period of trial flights, 140 in all, before the first passengers
lift off, probably about two years later. “Astronauts,” Mr Whitehorn
corrects me. “Well, they are astronauts. Astronaut passengers.” Will he be
one of them? “I'm going on the test-flying programme,” he says. “Quite late.”
Very wise. The first craft of this kind, SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnightOne, have
already flown, winning the Ansari X Prize in 2004 for becoming the first
privately funded spacecraft to go to space twice. But the technology
involved, based on the most modern carbon-fibre composite materials, is
relatively new.
The Virgin Galactic project dates back to a gathering in a Marrakesh hotel in
1995. Sir Richard Branson and Per Lindstrand, the balloonist, were present,
about to lift off on a round-the-world flight on Jetstream but delayed by
bad weather. Also present, Mr Whitehorn and Buzz Aldrin, the second man on
the Moon.
The talk turned to space. Sir Richard wondered idly whether anyone could use
balloons to lift spacecraft high enough to start their ascent, so getting
rid of those expensive, heavy and polluting rockets. “They did,” said
Aldrin. The US Navy had experimented with the idea in the 1950s. But with
Wernher von Braun then working with the military on ICBMs for the Cold War,
rockets were everything. The subsequent Apollo programme to land on the Moon
cemented the pre-eminence of the multi-stage booster.
A few years later, Virgin was examining various space projects, and came
across Burt Rutan, the California-based aerospace inventor and former test
pilot, who was pioneering the use of carbon-fibre composite materials in
commercial planes and is something of a national treasure in the US for his
innovative designs.
He had been hired by Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire, for a crack at the
Ansari X Prize, put up by a non-profit group that aims to stimulate
technological development. His solution was a two-part craft, both parts
reuseable. The bigger, WK1, was a large, twin-boomed craft with a huge wing
that carried the second, SS1, containing the passengers, at its centre. At
the correct altitude, the second ignited its rockets and took off vertically
into space.
WK1 bears a resemblance to Virgin Atlantic Global Flier, the craft that took
aviator Steve Fossett around the world non-stop, on a tankful of fuel in
2005. This was also designed and built by Mr Rutan. SS2 resembles, if
anything, a scaled-down Space Shuttle with bent back wings. These designs
are being scaled up for the Virgin fleet. Virgin agreed in 2004 to put $250
million into the venture, with about $100 million spent so far. It would get
two WK1s and five SS2s, which carry two pilots and six passengers - oh, all
right, astronauts. The flights will reach a height of 110km, though they can
go to 140km. Those inside SS2 will be weightless for about four minutes.
Mr Whitehorn, who joined Virgin in 1987 as public relations man and then
increasingly took on a managerial role, became president of Virgin Galactic
in 2004.
The first task was to demonstrate there was a big enough market to justify
putting the funds into what was, literally, a blue-sky venture. “We went out
and decided to try to sell tickets,” he says. “We thought the easiest place
to go first was people who wanted to go into space.”
The second phone call came, improbably, from Ms Principal, who has since her
days on the Dallas set built a large cosmetics business. Within months they
had $10million in deposits from 50 people. They looked at the typical
customer. More than half were qualified pilots, most were between 45 and 65,
and clearly, most had made enough money to afford such a luxury.
Furthermore, “every single one of them in the survey we did of them had
watched the Moon landing.”
As did Mr Whitehorn, whose mother predicted then that he would one day go into
space. That was the mood of the times. “When we watched 2001: A Space
Odyssey, we watched a Pan Am Clipper taking people to space stations. What
we found was so many people in the generation I'm in who had made their mark
on the world and wanted to go into space.”
So far, more than 250 customers have put down $35 million in deposits between
them, another 600 have signed up to put their money down once the programme
is under way and 85,000 have registered at a range of prices below the
current £100,000.
Mr Whitehorn thinks that it should be possible to get the cost down to less
than half of that. “The fascinating thing is, and I've worked for Virgin for
22 years and I've done some interesting projects in that time, that this is
a combination of a major industrial development project and a luxury goods
project. We are dealing with the same target market as people selling
Bentleys, Purdeys or trips to climb Everest.”
The cost of a Virgin Galactic trip does indeed compare with the last. “Their
chances of dying on a trip to Everest are one in 87. That's the same chance
of not coming back from a space mission over the last 40 years,” Mr
Whitehorn says. “We're designing a system which has got to be thousands and
thousands of times safer than that.”
Aged 48 and educated in Edinburgh and the University of Aberdeen, his first
experience of flying was in a Chipmunk light aircraft, as an RAF cadet at
age 16. He worked as a crewman on helicopters mainly serving the North Sea
rigs after university, then went into business, at Thomas Cook, the TSB bank
and City PR firm Lombard in the 1980s. Chris Wright of Chrysalis was a
client, which introduced him to music, and so to Virgin.
The company floated in December 1986 and was bought back by Sir Richard, at
the initial float price two years later despite the intervening market
crash. The market had turned against conglomerates, and also, it must be
said, against Virgin and Sir Richard. Once private, they developed what Mr
Whitehorn calls “a branded private equity/venture capital” approach.
This took the brand into some odd byways. Anyone remember Virgin Cola? The
chain of wedding shops? Nowadays Virgin is in financial services - it tried
to buy Northern Rock - mobile phones, flying through Virgin Atlantic and, of
course, rail, Mr Whitehorn having helped to develop the Pendelino tilting
train.
He is almost messianic about space. He believes Virgin's WK2s will provide a
cheap, environmentally friendly way of lifting payloads such as satellites
and scientists into space. Eventually will come cheap solar electricity,
generated in space and beamed back to Earth.
Innovations such as weather satellites and the GPS system, which allows more
careful shipping of food around the globe, have allowed farmers to raise
food production by 10 per cent, he says. “Space is so important. Another
billion people would be starving without space.”
CV: Will Whitehorn
Born: 22 January 1960.
Educated: Edinburgh Academy, University of Aberdeen.
1987: Joins Virgin Group as public relations manager.
2000: Appointed brand development and corporate affairs director.
2004: Becomes president, Virgin Galactic.
2007: Joins advisory board of the British National Space Centre.
Married, two children.
