This account was informed by discussions with eight people knowledgeable about the program. I’ve been covering this company for almost seven years, reporting on its triumphs and tragedies, and on the disconnect between its lofty rhetoric (“Virgin Galactic’s mission is to democratize space,” Branson has said) and its supersonic risks. Virgin Galactic is marketing its space-tourism business but for the time being remains an experimental flight-test program. “A private program can’t afford to lose anybody,” Branson has said.Īnd yet, perhaps more than any of its competitors, Branson’s company is already hard at work fashioning its identity as a luxury life-style brand. Their profits depend on making frequent and safe human spaceflight a reality. The foremost commercial space companies-Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin-must, over the coming years, bring that number down. Around 1.4 per cent of Russian, Soviet, and American crewed spaceflight missions have resulted in fatalities. If they didn’t fix it, they risked a perilous emergency landing in the desert on their descent. But it was veering off course, and the light was a warning to the pilots that their flight path was too shallow and the nose of the ship was insufficiently vertical. The craft was about twenty miles in the air above the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, and climbing, travelling more than twice the speed of sound. On July 11th, nearly a minute into the rocket trip carrying Richard Branson, the British billionaire, to space, a yellow caution light appeared on the ship’s console.
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