Branson: Behind the Mask Read Free Page A

rocket is safer than conventional rockets’. While Chase could not be immune to the pioneer’s distress over the tragedy, he was at the same time impressed by Rutan’s self-confidence. The eccentric designer, living in a half-buried pyramid sticking out of the sand near the airfield, commanded respect among the small community.
    Earning profits from space is a big risk. Fortune-hunters would do better drilling for oil, because those gambling on space need to be more stubborn, more creative and more charismatic than other ego-tripping adventurers, if only to attract investors. Ever since the end of the Apollo missions to the moon and the shuttle disasters, space had lost its shine. NASA, the American space agency, generated disillusion and was criticised for being bloated and dishonest. Washington had slashed the agency’s funding, especially the budget of the orbiting International Space Station. Each trip to the station by the space shuttle, with seven astronauts aboard, cost about $1 billion. To save money, NASA had paid the Russian government to deliver payloads and astronauts. Now, in a bid to reduce costs permanently, American entrepreneurs were being encouraged to develop cheap rockets to place satellites in orbit for experiments in a gravity-free environment and to deliver payloads and people to the space station. Their profits depended on building a reusable rocket or capsule so that space travel would resemble journeys by conventional aircraft. By adapting proven technology, rockets in the future would repeatedly take off, fly and land back on a runway.
    Richard Branson had been following Rutan’s progress ever since he had registered Virgin Galactic as a proprietary name in July 2002 – ‘several years before I met Rutan’, he would say.The idea had been sown by someone mentioning that 90,000 people had signed up to Pan Am’s First Moon Flights Club during the 1960s. The members included Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater. For the world’s master of publicity, the potential of Virgin Galactic became incalculable.
    The idea had been born in 1998. Chatting in a bar in Marrakech with Steve Fossett, his competitor in a round-the-world balloon race, Branson had heard about Rutan’s project to launch rockets from an old B-52 bomber. Two years later, Will Whitehorn, Virgin’s media-relations supremo, visited Rutan’s factory in Mojave and saw SpaceShipOne under construction. The cost – about $26 million – had been financed by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. The two men hoped to land the $10 million Ansari X Prize, which would be won by the first team to launch a manned spacecraft twice in two weeks using the same engine and sending it into space 100 kilometres from the Earth before returning.
    Whitehorn monitored Rutan’s progress. Two tests had been dangerous but successful, and by summer 2004 Whitehorn was sure that Rutan would win the prize. On 21 June, SpaceShipOne had completed an unpublicised piloted flight into space, landing back at Mojave airport. Rutan’s first publicised launch was due to take place on 29 September. The cost to buy into his venture, Branson was assured, was low, and considering that in 1986 Rutan had designed the first propeller plane to fly non-stop around the globe, the chances that Branson might be picking a winner were high. The clincher was the name. Virgin Galactic would give him the ultimate marketing image to reinvigorate his brand globally.
    On the day, WhiteKnight, a specially built twin-fuselage plane, moved slowly towards the runway. Attached under the fuselage was SpaceShipOne, the manned rocket. Strapped inside was Mike Melvill, the pilot. Just before take-off, a casket wasplaced alongside Melvill in the cockpit. Inside were the cremated remains of Rutan’s mother, who had died four years earlier. WhiteKnight took off and over the next hour climbed to 50,000 feet. Then, SpaceShipOne was dropped into the atmosphere and within seconds was soaring like a