The idea of taking tourists into space with his Virgin Galactic it will come to him about thirty years later. The one of getting on it too, aboard the Vss Unity space plane that will inaugurate a new business, will instead come to him shortly before the launch, fixed on 11 July 2021 at 3 pm Italian time. An idea with quite a bit of marketing incorporated, as the take-off will slightly anticipate that of another visionary, Jeff Bezos, ready to become an extraterrestrial on his Blue Origin’s New Shepard on July 20, exactly 52 years after the first, historic human moon landing.
There will be Bezos on Blue Origin’s first space journey
This, however, will happen thirty years and passes later.
Now, that is, well before he becomes the first billionaire to cross the sky in a vehicle built by his company, any London afternoon goes by at the end of 1969 and he, Richard Branson, has a different intuition: looking around he sees something that there, in front of everyone, no one else notices.
He’s 19 and has just been sentenced to a seven-pound fine for breaking two of Her Majesty’s laws for advertising a sex counseling service, another insight of his, published in the magazine. “Student“. By the way, too.”Student“it’s his idea: it’s a magazine published since ’68 and has come to host articles by Mick Jagger and John Lennon without actually creating a solid economy. An idea he had in the years of Stowe, the Buckinghamshire private school in which Branson, due to a slight dyslexia, he says, was the last of the class in almost all subjects. “Dear Branson – it seems the principal had told him when he was dismissed, not even graduated, in ’67 – if not you’ll end up in jail, you could become a millionaire. “
Jail, Branson, had just touched it – he will really do it and for fraud a few years later – but it would have been precisely that intuition in the editorial staff of “Student“to make him a millionaire.
There, in the confusion of the magazine’s headquarters, Branson notices that everyone is listening to the records of the moment. There are those who are not willing to spend 35 shillings to eat, but willingly give 40 to listen to the latest by Bob Dylan, the new of the Stones, the debut of Tangerine Dreams.
The idea of a record distribution by mail comes like a flash and allows him to sell albums at lower prices than any existing chain. The name of the new company instead suggests it to him by one of the editors of “Student“, who understood the imminent end of the magazine understands how Branson’s visions inaugurate unlikely horizons: Virgin Mailing Order debuts in flyers distributed on Oxford Street and outside concerts. Business takes off like a rocket. And that’s just the beginning of an empire.
It will always be like this, looking around and seizing the shoots of the future in the invisible to most, that Branson will transform Virgin into a leviathan with divisions in every field: Virgin Music (the record label of the Sex Pistols, of Peter Gabriel and also of the Stones) , Virgin Books, Virgin Active, Virgin Atlantic airline, then Virgin Trains, even Virgin Fuel. The group, which at the end of the 1980s also appeared briefly on the stock exchange, today records an annual turnover of over 20 billion pounds.
Seen in hindsight, space is just the most ambitious fruit of the Virgin’s garden. It is the natural horizon of those who, by character and talent, know how to seize the opportunities hidden in whatever surrounds them: isn’t the space, after all, the one in which we are all immersed?
Branson had the idea of exporting his businesses beyond the atmosphere as early as ’94, when he founded Virgin Galactic Airways, but it was ten years later, in the face of the inaugural flight of the space plane designed by his friend Burt Rutan, the SpaceShipOne, that the dream became more concrete.
As often happened to him, it was not strictly economic reasons that stimulated him (so much so that years after Virgin Galactic has yet to prove its economic solidity): for Branson the cosmos is only the obligatory destination of Man – “I believe that the state monopoly of space represented a danger, not the touted advantage, “he says. Accomplice admiration for Stephen Hawking, which in 2007 declared that it wanted to go beyond the atmosphere and want to do it with Branson, Virgin Galactic is the reality that first promised to take tourists beyond the Karman line, the one 100 kilometers from the earth’s surface that transforms into an astronaut who overcomes it. “Making space accessible to all to improve the world” replies Branson to those who ask him what the purpose of his galactic enterprise is.
Because beyond romanticism, the English tycoon was among the first to guess that the space economy it would be revolutionized by the progressive decrease in the cost of launches and by a new approach to risk, taken by weight from Silicon Valley. It is no coincidence that the tragic accident of 31 October 2014, when one of the two pilots, Michaes Alsbury, lost his life during a test of SpaceShipTwo, was only a slowdown. It’s the typical Branson approach: since then Virgin has successfully made other launches and brought into space, on February 22, 2019, also the first woman to do so on a commercial flight, the astronaut instructor Beth Moses.
Not that the business of the company is only playful. This is confirmed by the agreement, signed in October 2019 at the Italian Embassy in Washington, between Virgin and the Air Force, an agreement that will give three Italian researchers the opportunity to conduct experiments during a suborbital flight (experiments in the design phase with the Cnr). It is the first time that a government department has financed a human flight for scientific research purposes on a commercial spacecraft. And it is yet another paradigm shift, which disproves those who believed that the trips promised by Branson were just an outing for eccentric billionaires (who in any case, in 600, have already bought tickets for 200 thousand dollars each and that, in 700, crowd the waiting list).
The fundamental point, the one that will make the businesses of the space billionaires alla Branson, Bezos o Elon Musk, it’s right here: beyond the extraterrestrial capatine of Uncle Scrooge on duty, the commercial exploitation of low orbit could open the field to experiments in microgravity hitherto unthinkable. Allowing them also to companies, universities and laboratories previously excluded from the activity beyond the atmosphere and, who knows, inaugurating a new era of civil flights, such as those that already today hypothesize journeys from Brussels to Sydney in two and a half hours – like the project ” Stratofly H2020 “, of the European Union and of the Polytechnic of Turin.
In short, an idyll? Far from it; space is also strategic, reveals the scientific, technological and military power of those who manage to conquer it.
In this perspective, returning to the space billionaires, the announcement of the stay of Tom Cruise on the International Space Station, where the actor will make a film in 2022. The first in weightlessness? No, or at least not anymore, given that a few days ago it became known that the Russian star was on 5 October Yulia Peresild will anticipate “Top Gun” Tom on the orbiting station for the filming of the own live action movie.
The film, whose working title is The challenge, will be co-produced by Dmitry Rogozin, the director general of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. It’s hard to ignore the political subtext of this other … challenge.
So no, when Bezos and Cruise will also be in space and when any citizen can do the same, it won’t be just space tourism. It will be a new era. Because going into space is certainly a dream not limited to those 500-odd ones who have already done it. It is an opportunity found in what surrounds us. Literally. For over thirty years, pure Branson intuition.
.