Branson: Behind the Mask Read Free

take tourists into space.’ For three years, Branson had been touting $200,000 tickets to the super-rich eager to experience four minutes of weightlessness and a glimpse of the globe before tilting back towards Earth. Virgin’s ride into space had glorified the corporation’s image. The explosion could endanger the brand, the foundation of Branson’s fortunes.
    The tycoon depended on his publicists to contradict the cynics. Through a well-tuned network of sympathisers employed by the media, his loyalists smothered those questioning the use of nitrous oxide and defused any doubts about the rocket’s safety. The summary of perfunctory media reports delivered the following morning to Necker confirmed their success. No doubts were cast on Virgin’s ability to eventually succeed in its ambition to send tourists into space. There was an unfortunate contrast between the pristine sand on his Caribbean island and the desert scrub in Mojave after the explosion, but trust in Branson meant that even the bereaved families uttered no criticism of their employer.
    After the explosion, at 5 p.m. Randy Chase arrived at the site to investigate the cause of the incident. Born in 1953 and raised on a small farm, Chase was employed by California’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). His task was to decide whether the deaths were caused by accident or possibly criminal negligence. If Chase suspected any misconduct, two reputations – Burt Rutan’s and Richard Branson’s – might suffer and Virgin Galactic’s fate would be jeopardised.
    Barred from entering the site by the local sheriff’s tape, Chase viewed the devastation in the fading light. Live images had been transmitted from the remote cameras guided by agentsemployed by Hazmat, the agency responsible for detecting chemical hazards. ‘God knows what happened,’ he said. He had studied industrial safety at a local college, and thereafter had investigated accidents in mines, factories and oil wells. He knew nothing about ‘cold-flow’ tests of nitrous oxide through valves. ‘No one’s to touch anything on the scene until I get back,’ he ordered. He would drive through the night back to his home and collect his clothes, ready for what he anticipated would be a long inquiry into ‘a high-profile accident’.
    In the morning, Chase returned to Mojave. His orders, he discovered, had been disobeyed, and the control truck had been moved from the site. ‘We needed to protect the computer hard drive,’ he was told. Chase unquestioningly accepted the explanation, unaware that the engineers’ visible shock masked fears about the rocket’s safety.
    For the first time, Chase inspected the area. The isolation was eerie. The hot sun intensified the silence across the scrub. ‘There are no blood stains in front of the fence,’ he noted. ‘All the deaths happened behind the fence.’
    None of the engineers corrected Chase’s inexplicable error. Chase knew that the explosion had been recorded on video by Scaled and also on eyewitnesses’ mobile telephones. But he was unaware of one particular clip showing Glenn May darting in front of the fence with two other engineers just before the explosion. He saw only two videos showing the three men walking towards a gap in the fence but no further. He would be emphatic that any eyewitness who saw the three in front of the fence ‘is wrong’.
    The approach of the engineers had been to volunteer their co-operation and play on his ignorance. Drinking coffee in the Voyager, the cosy diner underneath Mojave airport’s control tower next to the runway, Chase became relaxed among his new friends. The diner’s walls were covered with photographs ofBurt Rutan celebrating his triumph in 2004 as the winner of the Ansari X Prize, a competition aimed at encouraging commercial flights into space. The ruddy-faced designer with mutton-chop sideburns had sent one man into space in a cheap rocket, boasting afterwards that ‘this