Richard Branson’s Quest: Go boldly where no billionaire has gone before | Virgo Galactic

IIt doesn’t rain often in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Still, Sir Richard Branson is likely to feel nervous checking the weather forecast on Sunday morning: If a blue sky is on the horizon, the British entrepreneur is likely to become the richest person to ever go into space.

Branson and his team, two pilots and three other mission specialists will attach themselves to the spacecraft, the VSS Unity. If all goes well, Branson and co will be propelled 50 miles above Earth’s surface, the point considered by NASA, the US space agency, to mark the end of Earth’s atmosphere.

The mission for 70-year-old Branson, whose expertise lies in starting new businesses rather than the technicalities of spaceflight, will be to evaluate the private astronaut experience, such as the seating comfort and the view of the Earth. It will also be a marketing coup for his company, Virgin Galactic, and a nosebleed for its billionaire rivals.

The Sunday launch schedule kicks off at 7 a.m. in New Mexico, 9 a.m. on the US East Coast and 2 p.m. in the UK.

A successful launch would usher in the next phase in a private sector space race between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos Branson and Tesla CEO Elon Musk as they attempt to open the final frontier to the paying public, or to at least the ones with hundreds of thousands of dollars left.

Virgin Galactic did not announce the flight date on Saturday until July 2. It would mean Branson, whose personal fortune is worth $3.8 billion according to the Sunday Times, would send Bezos, the world’s richest man, into space for nine days.

If that’s Richard’s motivation, good luck to him, said Will Whitehorn, a former president of Virgin Galactic and now president of the trade organization UKspace. It will essentially be a British victory. If there’s a little bit of rivalry to take us to the next industrial stage in human history, I’m all for it.

Branson’s carbon composite VSS Unity (aka SpaceShipTwo) itself will be suspended from a mothership aircraft, VMS Eve (aka WhiteKnightTwo). VMS Eve has a double-hull design with four jet engines under 140-foot wings, so it can carry the smaller craft for about an hour underneath. Once it reaches the correct height, VSS Unity peels off and makes its way vertically into space.

Branson and the other passengers, an engineer, an astronaut instructor and a rather unlikely government affairs officer for Virgin Galactic, will experience microgravity and will be able to see the Earth below through portholes. The plan is for the craft to then re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and hopefully perform a smooth corkscrew flight back to New Mexico. The entire journey is expected to take less than two hours.

Two additional test flights are planned before Virgin Galactic starts commercial services in 2022. By 2023, the company could operate 100 flights per year.

Branson’s business has had many false starts. In 2004, he said that paying passengers could fly into space by 2007-2008. That schedule has been repeatedly postponed, partly because of two deadly disasters. In 2007, three workers died in an explosion while testing a rocket propulsion system. Seven years later, an explosion during a test flight over the Mojave Desert killed the craft pilot.

This time, however, Virgin Galactics engineers seem to have solved the technical issues, and Branson has other wealthy backers on their side (Whitehorn told the Guardian the level of safety was now equivalent to helicopters). Branson floated shares in Virgin Galactic on the New York Nasdaq stock exchange (ticker: SPCE) in September through a merger with a special acquisition company (coincidentally known by its acronym Spac).

Myles Walton, an analyst at investment bank UBS, said Virgin Galactic has a future as the super-rich, one of the most exclusive experiences around. His modeling of funding, barring major issues, shows the company could be profitable as early as 2023.

Ticket prices are likely to be between $300.00 (217,000) and $400,000 initially, Walton wrote in a research note in May, putting them much higher than most people. However, with the rapid growth in the number of super-rich around the world, we don’t see a shortage of potential customers in the pipeline, he wrote.

As of March 31, the company had received approximately 600 space flight ticket reservations, securing valuable deposits worth $80 million. Higher ticket sales could eventually lead to prices going down.

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However, multiple space flights come at a cost of carbon. Virgin Galactic says it wants to launch a new era of clean and sustainable access to space and that the carbon footprint per passenger will be comparable to a transatlantic business class seat. Whitehorn says there could ultimately be an environmental benefit to the ambitions of space billionaires, even if the target appears to fall into the realm of science fiction for the time being.

If you look at Bezos, Musk and Branson, the vision is that there will be an industrial revolution in space. We need to put our industry that warms the planet outside the atmosphere.

But Branson will first have to prove that his venture works. Whitehorn adds that the 90-minute flight time would be another advantage for the businessman: watching England v Italy. He wants to go back to the final.