Branson Collects $42 Million From Would-Be Astronauts (Update2)
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By Steve Rothwell
Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Ltd. venture is riding out the recession, with would-be astronauts paying $42 million to book a trip to the edge of space, its chief executive officer said.
Virgin Galactic added $4 million in deposits in the past nine months, CEO Will Whitehorn said in an interview. Fees range from a minimum $20,000 to the full $200,000 fare, with singer Sarah Brightman, physicist Stephen Hawking and X-Men director Bryan Singer among more than 300 clients to sign up. Virgin aims to sell at least 700 tickets by the first commercial launch.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will unveil Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo model at a test site in the Mojave Desert today, with the first commercial flight scheduled to take place from Spaceport America, New Mexico, in the next couple of years. A handful of lost contracts included one from a client who invested money through swindler Bernard Madoff, Whitehorn said.
“We’ve had very rapid growth in the past few months because people are seeing something coming to fruition,” Whitehorn said Dec. 3 in London.
Virgin Galactic has spent about $200 million on the project out of a budget of $450 million. Branson, who also owns Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. and Virgin Trains, sold a 32 percent stake in Virgin Galactic to Aabar Investments PJSC of Abu Dhabi in July, raising $280 million. The purchase valued the venture at $900 million.
Weightlessness
Virgin’s prototype SpaceShipOne flew to the edge of space three times in 2004. SpaceShipTwo will be taken to 50,000 feet by the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, powered by four Pratt & Whitney PW308 engines, from where it will fire its own rocket motor and climb to 360,000 feet (110 kilometers).
The craft is designed to carry two pilots and six passengers who will experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the earth during a six-minute suborbital flight.
The vehicle creates high drag on reentering the atmosphere, slowing it down sufficiently to guard against burning up without heat shields or tiles and allowing it to glide to earth unaided by sophisticated computers or arduous piloting, Virgin says.
Virgin Galactic has commissioned three carrier planes and five spacecraft from Spaceship Co., its venture with Northrop Grumman Corp.’s Scaled Composites unit. The company was set up so that in future it can take orders from other customers.
‘Happy To Be Back’
“It’s creating a lot of interest and they must believe the technology is ready to roll,” said Professor George Fraser, director of the Space Research Centre at Leicester University, England. “But 700 bookings is only 100 flights, and I suspect this is the sort of thing people will do once and just be happy to be back on the ground safe.”
Fraser said the use of the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft as a platform from which to launch a more powerful rocket able to achieve full earth orbit might have more potential in the longer term. The technology would allow much more affordable deployment of mini satellites weighing tens of kilograms, he said.
“The main challenge, as with any new aircraft, will be to get through the tests with the regulators,” said Pat Norris, Chairman of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Space Group, by telephone. “It’s hard to tell what might go wrong.”
Starship Enterprise
SpaceShipTwo is designed to carry “many thousands of private astronauts into space,” Virgin said today in a statement prior to the unveiling ceremony, where Schwarzenegger and Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico are due to name the craft Virgin Space Ship -- or VSS -- Enterprise.
About 600 people are working in positions related to the project, which builds on technology first funded by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen in an effort to win the X-Prize contest to develop a non-government reusable space vehicle. That figure will probably rise to more than 1,100 at the peak of infrastructure construction, the statement said.
“It’s momentous,” Whitehorn said. “There is this pent up demand for access to space, and the breakthroughs coming in the next two years are going to game-change that. What we call it internally is the industrial revolution of space.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Steven Rothwell in London at srothwell@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: December 7, 2009 14:02 EST
