If you think Sir Richard Branson’s roll of the dice with Virgin Galactic is just an eccentric billionaire’s hobby, think again.

Admittedly, it started that way. In this article in The Telegraph the entrepreneur admits he was inspired as a child watching live pictures of Man’s first furtive steps on the moon (“I couldn't become [an astronaut], so I built my own space ship,” he jokes).

But Virgin Galactic is shaping up like a real business and not the money pit many people foresaw. Thanks to Branson we really are a heartbeat away from the commercialisation of sub-orbital space.

The company’s chief executive, Sir Richard’s right-hand man Will Whitehorn, says it will cost $300m to get off the ground, an amount most entrepreneurs think of as an ideal business sale price, not start-up capital.

But Virgin has some interesting plans for clawing the money back. So much so top bods expect it to break even as early as 2012.

For starters there’s the space tourism bit: each flight weighs in at $200,000 for two hours floor-to-floor and about five minutes of weightlessness. The company has deposits totalling $37m and demand doubled this year compared with 2007.

If you have a satellite, Virgin Galactic will launch it into space for the knock-down price of $1.8m – a figure which significantly undercuts NASA.

Then there’s the rather jazzy ‘space ships’ themselves, which have piqued the interest of a handful of governments, armed forces and environmental groups. Eventually you’ll be able to pick one up for around $40m (about the same as a fighter jet) and Virgin has received a dozen enquiries already.

It’s also sustainable. Each trip produces 40 per cent less CO2 than a flight from London to New York and Branson is working with engine manufacturers to run flights on renewable jet fuel.

As Virgin makes more money from these endeavours and technology advances, so the price tags will come down; opening up Virgin Galactic’s services to an ever wider pool of buyers.

If Branson is successful the ramifications will of course be huge for transport, tourism, war, and research. This really could be one giant leap for entrepreneurs.

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By Dan Matthews  on   Aug 11,2008

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Keywords

Virgin Galactic    Richard Branson    tourism    space    Virgin   

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