Video: Branson Talks Virgin Galactic Again
Editor’s Note: Every time I hear Branson talk about Virgin Galactic, I’m always reminded of Lord Whorfin’s speech in Buckaroo Bonzai: Across the 8th Dimension.
Lord John Whorfin: Where are we going?
Red Lectroids: Planet Ten!
Lord John Whorfin: When?
Red Lectroids: Real soon!
Their subsequent attempt to break on through doesn’t go exactly according to plan.
“We’re not in the 8th dimension. We’re over New Jersey,” a Red Lectroid reports dryly after their vehicle crashes through the wall of Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems. (The company’s motto is, “The Future Begins Tomorrow.”)
Branson recently said that SpaceShipTwo Unity would be in space in weeks, not months, implying that a flight featuring a full-duration engine burn of about one minute was imminent.
He’s made similar predictions before without Virgin Galactic blasting a spaceship past the Karman line. Nicholas Schmidle asked him about it for a profile he did for The New Yorker of pilot Mark Stucky titled, “Virgin Galactic’s Rocket Man,”
Branson admitted to me, “It would be embarrassing if someone went back over the last thirteen years and wrote down all my quotes about when I thought we would be in space.” But he also defended his approach: “If you are an optimist and you talk ahead of yourself, then everybody around you has got to catch up and try to get there.”
Huh. So all this…um…stuff — for lack of a better word — he’s been saying for 14 years was to keep the program moving along? To inspire the employees? Did it work?
And how should we judge his latest schedule pronouncement? Is it an accurate prediction of things to come? Or an effort to motivate the troops to overcome whatever issues they might have discovered during the previous three powered flight tests of Unity?
Time will tell. It’s been three months since the last flight test at the end of July. And the fourth anniversary of the loss of SpaceShipOne Enterprise is coming up on Halloween. That anniversary is, emotionally speaking, like a bad case of acid reflux. Brings up a lot of sad memories and emotions.
9 responses to “Video: Branson Talks Virgin Galactic Again”
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Can anyone explain why they’re taking such an insane length of time to build each one of these planes?
they are one of a kind
Yeah, pretty much. If there’s anything resembling a production line it’s hardly obvious by inspection. Each vehicle seems to require insane amounts of hand labor to craft – like the Spruce Goose in its day or like show cars both yesterday and today. The Falcon 9, Atlas 5 and Delta IV are industrial products in serial production. Rocket Lab Electron and Virgin Orbit LauncherOne will be too, fairly shortly. SpaceShipTwo is artisanal.
As I understand it, they are making some pretty significant changes along the way. That adds a lot of time.
Flight tests are designed to find problems. Perhaps they have found some problems.
The Burt Rutan vehicle design is the problem. The hybrid motor is a structural part of the vehicle, but could not be refilled and be reused. They basically have to rebuild Spaceship Two after every hybrid motor ignition.
They should have gone with some sort of reusable liquid motor.
People suggested it to Rutan after SpaceShipOne. Missed opportunity. I think Virgin Orbit has a better chance of having a real impact on the space industry. I’ve heard good things about it from people I know.
He sounds like a broken man; resigned to the fact that he supported and backed a white elephant – but doesn’t want to admit there’s an elephant in the room.
The current state of manned commercial spaceflight is … well … pathetic. Private companies have been building vehicles for years, nay, decades. No one has flown a human to space since the end of the Space Shuttle program. And ironically, after 14 years of development, it appears that Virgin Galactic will indeed be the first ones to go to space according to some kind of a definition (in this case, the 80-km boundary used in the USA). The last flight in July took Unity to 50 km. Perhaps the next one will be historic.
Thus said, I do wonder what the hell is going on out there. When powered flights resumed, the gaps between them were just 2 months. We had one flight in April, one before the end of May, one in July.
After that… nothing. I personally expected the next powered flight to be in the end of September. September came and went, and nothing happened. October is almost over, and nothing continues to happen. Meanwhile the Twitter account of VG got very active, talking about interviews, awards, awareness… chatting about everything else except for, well, ongoing flight tests.
OK, I know that manned spaceflight is a risky thing and they should be careful. But I do wonder what’s going on with all these delays. I prefer suborbital tourism to start sooner rather than later, as I’m sick of flatearthers and conspiracy nuts.