Sir Richard takes Virgin into Space 158
quizdog writes "The latest issue of
Wired has a story on Sir Richard Branson and the history of the Virgin Empire, focusing on his latest venture of partnering with Scaled Composites and Burt Rutan to bring the
X-Prize-winning SpaceShipOne hybrid rocket technology to the point where paying passengers can slip those 'surly bonds' of the atmosphere. Starting
at just $200,000 a pop - any chance of a volume discount?" We first mentioned this a while back, but Wired's coverage is nice to see as well.
Article text (Score:2, Informative)
Richard Branson conquered the world. Now he wants to fly you to space.
By Spencer Reiss
One lightly frozen billionaire has just climbed down from the port wing of a Virgin Atlantic 747 parked at the edge of a runway at Mojave Airport. It's a blustery gray morning in California's southern desert, and Virgin in chief Richard Branson has spent more than an hour standing in the wind, waiting to tape the opening sequence of his new reality show, Rebel Billionaire. The jet's not going anywhere, either: It's a mothballed reserve plane, prettied up just for the shoot. "We've been thinking about sinking her in the Caribbean for divers," says Branson, deep-sixing hot cocoa from a styrofoam cup.
Suddenly the sun pops out. Branson clambers back up onto the wing and runs through his paces again for the boom-rigged camera: crossed-arm stance, million-mile gaze across the desert, then a quick turn as the lens swoops in for a close-up, with a tease of that famous toothy grin and a glint of sky-blue eyes. Take that, Donald Trump! The rest of the cast hustles out onto the wing, the camera whirs again, and it's a wrap. To celebrate, Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, 54-year-old lord of a $9 billion-a-year global empire, joins his happy TV troupe in mooning the crew. Everyone cracks up.
Branson has been mugging and grinning, diving and rappelling, ballooning and mooning his way to extreme mogulhood for nearly 40 years. (He started his first business, a magazine, while still in boarding school.) In that time, his Virgin Group has expanded from a funky record business into a sprawling keiretsu encompassing air travel, cell phones, train travel, soft drinks, African safaris, digital downloads, and Caribbean hideaways. Branson's own Virgin Island - no kidding - is available starting at $25,000 a day. All of which adds up to a personal fortune pegged by Forbes at $2.2 billion.
Despite such a dazzling career, the business world has always been ambivalent toward Britain's best-known entrepreneur. He launches trendy companies the way Trump builds casinos. But a farsighted innovator like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or even Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher he is not. Branson traffics in opportunism. He spots a stodgy, old-line industry, rolls out the Virgin logo, sprinkles some camera-catching glitter, and poof - another moneymaker. While that formula has kept him in champagne and headlines, no Virgin business has ever changed the world.
Until now. Mojave Airport isn't just where aging jets wait to die; it's where the dusty dream of commercial space travel is finally coming alive. Last summer, a tiny winged wonder called SpaceShipOne spiked 62 miles into the desert sky on its way to nailing the $10 million X Prize for the first sustainable civilian suborbital flight. The world's stuffed-shirt airline chiefs took one look and went back to worrying about fuel prices. Branson took one look at the gleaming white carbon-fiber spaceship and said, Beam me up.
The upshot is Virgin Galactic, the world's first off-the-planet private airline. Under a deal still being negotiated with SpaceShipOne's owners - Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and legendary Mojave airplane designer Burt Rutan - Virgin will pay up to $21.5 million for an exclusive license to SpaceShipOne's core design and technologies. Another $50 million will go to Rutan's company Scaled Composites to build five tricked-out passenger spaceships. An equal amount will be invested in operations, including a posh Virgin Earth Base somewhere in the California desert. Total outlay: $121.5 million. Business plan: 50 passengers a month, paying $200,000 each. Core product: a two-hour flight to an apex beyond Earth's atmosphere, wrapped in a three-day astronaut experience. Lift off: T-minus three years.
Of course, Virgin Galactic is a tiny bit riskier than the typical Branson venture. For starters, the first passenger-carrying Virgin spaceship - already dubbed VSS Enterprise - is still just a glow on Rutan's co
Re:Boooooring (Score:3, Informative)
How would you define "real space travel"?
Judging by the cockpit view [scaled.com], this sure seems like space travel as far as I'm concerned.
The Wright Brother's big advance was controlled, powered flight. Lots of people could shoot a projectile from one end of the field to the other, which is all (effectively) that was accomplished by Burt Rutan.
SpaceShipOne is equipped with (and makes heavy use of) a reaction control system [howstuffworks.com], which operates in the same general fashion as the reaction control systems on other [nasa.gov] spacecraft [klabs.org].
Entrepreneur of the Year: Burt Rutan (Score:5, Informative)
A snippet:
As a manager, Rutan has proven intuitively adept at inspiring loyalty and extraordinary work. He doesn't worry so much about the formal background of the engineers he hires. He looks for people who share his passion for aircraft design and gives those who have it free rein. Instead of the specialists sought by aerospace companies, he encourages his staffers to remain generalists who can design anything from a fuselage to a door handle and then go into the shop and build it. Chief engineer Matthew Gionta recalls starting off at the company right out of graduate school in 1994 and being handed the project-leader slot on an ultra-high-tech unmanned aircraft. "What I had to learn on the job made my formal education pale in comparison, but I had to learn it because no one else was going to do it for me," Gionta says. "The stress took years off my life, but when you get that kind of responsibility, it's hard not to feel ownership."
Rutan is loath to codify his approach to managing. "I don't like rules," he says. "Things are so easy to change if you don't write them down." But one way or another, he has communicated a few simple principles to employees. One is that when it comes to safety issues -- and in aircraft design, almost everything is a safety issue -- everyone should be quick to raise questions. Rutan makes sure that when people at Scaled point out their own mistakes, they're applauded rather than reprimanded. And instead of extensively analyzing a design before building it, a notion that's axiomatic in the aerospace industry, Rutan pushes his people to get a first version built quickly, test it, and fix it. Says Gionta: "Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding."