Will You Travel to Space?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:31)

The new Red Bull Dragonberry Energizer is now at McDonald's.

Matt O'Dowd (0:45)

The private space race has been on for a while now. The attention has been on Space-X and Blue Origin with their reusable rockets. But there's one private space program that's been doing things a little differently.

Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, isn't building rockets at all. It's building spaceships.

Amid the loud rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, amid the extravagance of self-landing rockets and other displays, Virgin Galactic achieved something that no other private space company ever has. In 2014, it became the first to put an actual person in space on board its SpaceShipOne, turning its pilot into an astronaut. And then, on February 22, 2019, the VSS Unity reached space in a suborbital flight, carrying the first ever passenger astronaut on a private spacecraft. The attention of space nerds everywhere, long distracted by the self-landing rocket club, suddenly turned back to Virgin Galactic. Questions abound. Is there a future in these strange air-launched spaceships? Why is Richard Branson building spaceships at all? And what other mad schemes lie in the future? And, most importantly, when can we go up? Obviously, these are questions probably best answered by Richard Branson. Now, in classic eccentric billionaire style, Branson spends much of his time on his private island in the British Virgin Islands.

But, by strange chance, through a series of unusual events, I found myself on that island. It's a long story for another time. But I took the opportunity to sit Sir Richard down and blast him with questions. This was all a little impromptu, so please bear with the audio. So, congratulations are in order. VSS Unity, SpaceShipTwo successfully kissed Space December 13th.

That must have been incredibly exciting, a huge milestone in a very long project.

Richard Branson (2:57)

Yeah, thank you. It was not only exciting, it was quite a relief.

It has been 14 years of tears and joy, and it was just fantastic. Two wonderful, now, astronauts managed to get into space. And we've got another test flight just coming up, and then there will be a couple more test flights. Then we'll move the whole operation to New Mexico, where we've got this beautiful spaceport. And yeah, I'm hoping to go up in July, and then have many others who've signed up can go up in the years to come.

Matt O'Dowd (3:31)

Well, I would say that it's brave of you for proving the reliability by going up this or people are sending other people up. But I'm feeling you wouldn't miss it.

Richard Branson (3:41)

The reason we built a spaceship...

SPEAKER_1 (3:46)

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SPEAKER_2 (4:16)

The new Red Bull Dragonberry Energizer is now at McDonald's. Made with freeze-dried dragon fruit and made to lock in.

The all-new Energizer now at McDonald's.

Richard Branson (4:30)

The reason I wanted to go up was because I wanted to build a spaceship.

Matt O'Dowd (4:33)

OK, wanting to go to space is a pretty good reason to build a spaceship. But Richard followed up with what sounds closer to his true motivation.

Richard Branson (4:42)

Everybody I know who's been into space has said it was Earth-changing. And to be able to be in space, looking back on it, there's a lovely book called The Overview Effect, which is infused with all these people who've been into space. And also space, I think, can do a lot to protect the Earth. And we're also going to be putting up bigger arrays of satellites around the world to connect people who are not connected. And those satellites can check out on illegal fishing boats that are ravaging the ocean. We can start monitoring the reefs in a systematic way. There's an awful lot of good that has already come out of space and will come out in the years to come.