Do you want to join the 68 - mile high club with Richard Branson?

By Damon Syson

The ultimate holiday destination is not longer a seven-star hotel or a remote Caribbean island. In fact it is only 68 miles away - yet it will cost you £300k to get there. Richard Branson takes LIVE on an exclusive tour of his space centre



Hi, I'm Richard Branson and my hobbies are… "mad sports, I suppose."

Branson, his 22-year-old son Sam and I are sitting in the classroom of the National Aerospace Training and Research Center (Nastar) in Pennsylvania.

We're preparing to experience a simulated suborbital space flight.

Our instructor, Glenn King, complete with military-style short hair, has introduced himself and now it's the turn of his pupils.



Richard Branson in the cockpit of the space flight simulator

King is a former jet pilot and US Special Forces HALO (high-altitude, low-opening) skydiving instructor, with 1,200 jumps to his name.

Beside him is a lugubrious-looking doctor who will be monitoring our hearts with an electrocardiogram during the flight.

"I'm here to ensure you have a safe day," he says solemnly. "But if you have an unsafe day, we can handle that as well."

This is the "academic" part of today's programme – a crash course in the effects of G-force.

During today's "flight" in the £15 million centrifuge chamber, we will be subjected to a maximum of 6G.

King explains that high G-forces cause blood to pool in your lower extremities, depriving the brain of oxygen.

This can result in G-loc – loss of consciousness.

"Just enjoy yourself," he says.

"You'll feel your face pulling and your voice will change – but that's all normal.

"Try touching your nose. But be careful not to poke yourself in the eye, because at 6G your hand is six times heavier."

We troop upstairs to a viewing room above the chamber while Branson takes his place in the gondola at the end of a 25ft-long rotating steel arm.

Settling into the seat, he looks nervous.

He runs his hand through his hair and chews his lower lip. A "launch attendant" tightens his straps, clips a pulse oximeter on to his index finger and gives him a final good-luck pat on the shoulder before closing the metal door with a resounding clunk.

Branson is now alone in the cockpit. He's still chatting and cracking jokes but beneath the trademark grin his teeth are gritted.

There's a mild jolt as the 4,000hp engine whirs into action, and then a synthetic-sounding female voice comes over the intercom: "Release from White KnightTwo begins in five… four… three… two… one."

The cockpit lurches forward. "OK, Richard, you're in flight at 50,000ft,~" says King. "Enjoy your ride."

The massive steel arm begins its sweep round the chamber, and Branson's body is pinned back into the seat, his mouth pulled into a taut grimace.

As his vocal cords are pushed against his spine, his voice sounds strangled. But this doesn't stop him breaking into a huge grin. "Yes!" he shouts. "We're going to space!"

Then it's my turn. I'm taken into a medical room, where the doctor takes my pulse before attaching ECG pads to my chest.

On the way to the chamber I keep telling myself there's nothing to worry about but I have to admit I am nervous.

As I'm strapped into the pod, a familiar voice comes over the intercom. "It's Richard here. I just wanted to wish you luck. Have a great trip."

The gondola then pitches forward and I'm off. The initial "ascent" lasts 70 seconds and feels like the most intense curve of a truly gut-churning roller-coaster.

I find myself grimacing involuntarily and my chest feels as if it has a heavy weight pressing on it.

I concentrate on pushing down with my feet and tensing my legs as I have been taught.

Thankfully, before I know it the worst is over and I'm able to relax and enjoy the ride.

The most surprising thing are the visuals.

With three screens in front of you and various cool-looking dials, you really do feel like you're in a spaceship.

The rear-view screen is especially impressive – I watch the coast of southern California vanishing behind me before everything suddenly goes quiet and black and I'm in space.

On the way down, the feeling is even more bizarre.

My cheeks are pulled back and it feels as if a hippo is sitting on my lap.

But it's only a minor discomfort, and by concentrating on my breathing I'm able to relax and enjoy the weirdness of it all.

I have experienced a simulation of space travel, but within two years, customers will be doing it for real on Branson's space-tourism venture.

Two hundred people have already signed up to go into space with Virgin Galactic.

Those who have stumped up the $200,000 (£100,000) for the first 100 seats will have a three-hour round trip and join a seriously exclusive club.

The vessel, SpaceShipTwo, will not be able to achieve orbit but will carry passengers on brief ballistic arcs outside the atmosphere, 68 miles above Earth.

There they will experience four minutes of weightlessness, the total silence of space and one hell of a view.

Unclipping their seatbelts and floating around the cabin, the "tourists" will be surrounded by the darkness of space but able to see the curvature of the Earth and 1,000 miles in any direction.

So from the north of Scotland you could see Iceland, the Norwegian fjords and the length of Britain.

The experience will be brief.

The "slingshot" method means the craft skims the edge of space then falls back.

The spacecraft will pass back into the atmosphere, gliding to Earth and making a normal runway landing.

On the inaugural flight, Branson has decided to take his family – his parents, Eve, 83, and Ted, 91, his daughter Holly, 26, and his son, Sam.

The final seat will be occupied by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, who designed Virgin Galactic's prototype spacecraft.

It's not every day you see a knight of the realm, a man with a personal fortune of £4 billion, standing before you wearing only socks, pants and a grey vest.

But then again, Sir Richard Branson is no ordinary multi-billionaire.

It's Sunday night and he's just flown into Philadelphia from Necker Island (the 74-acre private retreat in the British Virgin Islands that he bought for £180,000 in 1978) and come straight to the hotel room for his Live photo-shoot.

With David Bowie's Space Oddity playing in the background, the photographer gestures to the space suit we've provided and asks hesitantly, "We were wondering if you'd wear this, Richard."

Branson starts unbuckling his belt…

We'd been warned that he was tired, but you wouldn't know it.

The veteran of thousands of photo-shoots, he gets to work without fuss.

"Can we have you smiling, please, Richard?"

"It's a lot easier when there's a pretty girl behind you," he says, grinning cheekily at the make-up artist, the first of a succession of minor flirtations he conducts with several attractive females in the vicinity.

Branson is an old-school ladies' man. If it moves he will flirt with it, even though he has been with his wife, Joan, for more than 30 years.

Although you wouldn't know it at the time, he confesses later that he felt uneasy about donning the space suit.

He is no stranger to dressing up for the cause but this time he thinks the product is dramatic enough without him needing to try too hard.

He's also aware of claims by some that he is a chancer who survives on publicity stunts.

"I think we can be pretty cool about this one," he says over dinner that evening.

"I think it will promote itself. Once we unveil what the spaceship looks like, it's so breathtaking it'll sell itself."

This uncharacteristic coyness could also be the result of a nasty scare six weeks ago when Branson jumped off the 407ft Palms Hotel in Las Vegas in a parachute harness to promote the launch of his no-frills US airline Virgin America.

Instead of gliding smoothly to the ground, he smashed into the side of the building.

When I ask him if he still considers himself an adrenaline junkie, he replies: "Was I ever an adrenaline junkie? Maybe I was. Well, having nearly killed myself when I jumped off that building, I guess not any more.

"I hit the building once, fortunately on my backside. Then I hit it again, and the second time I thought, “****, I've broken my back.”

"When I got to the bottom I felt like a rag doll. I had no idea what damage I'd done. Fortunately, it was mainly just to my ego."

Branson may have a reputation as a daredevil but he needs to play that down over the next couple of years.

Convincing the public that you can safely transport them beyond the Earth's atmosphere in a massive firework is a lot harder if people think of you as someone who has a habit of crashing into things.

As things stand, there is no insurance available to Virgin Galactic's customers, although companies are looking into it.

Because space tourism is in its infancy, underwriters are still assessing the risks involved.

But Branson is keen to stress that his latest endeavour is the opposite of an adrenaline ride.

"Virgin Galactic is all about making space travel comfortable and safe," he says.

"That's the only way we're going to pull it off.

"It's potentially like being at the beginning of transatlantic air travel. Those flights were very expensive in the Twenties.

"But after 20 or 30 years most people had a chance of experiencing it once in their lives.

"It's our aim to get the price down to a level where people can think, “Am I going to go to Australia on holiday – or am I going to go into space?”"

Will Whitehorn – president of Virgin Galactic and one of Branson's most trusted consiglieri – claims that making Virgin Galactic a profitable business will take about three years of flying.

"Our business plan depends on us taking up about 40,000 people in ten years.

"But if we're successful in filling all the flights, we'll be profitable within three years.

"Once we've achieved that we can start to bring down the price.

"Our ambition is to begin reducing the price by year five so that by the end of a ten-year programme the cost in today's money will be about $75,000 (£38,000). At that point the market will grow exponentially."

Whitehorn dimisses the suggestion that space tourism already exists in the form of Space Adventures, a company that will arrange a stay on the International Space Station – assuming you have £10 million and nine months of your life to spare.

"Space Adventures allows people to join a Russian mission as private individuals – for a large fee," says Whitehorn. "That's not tourism."

The long-term plan is for Virgin Galactic's space craft, SpaceShipTwo, to be able to take off from any number of locations.

It is already planning flights from Kiruna in northern Sweden, 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle, which they hope will be able to travel through the aurora borealis.

"Nobody knows what that looks like from inside," says Whitehorn.

"Although people have fired test rockets underneath it and the Space Shuttle has photographed it from above, no human being has actually been through the aurora borealis.

"We imagine it will look very ethereal, like a mist of ionised particles."

But environmentalists are far from excited by the prospect.

Friends of the Earth has branded Virgin Galactic's plans "elitist and irresponsible".

Whitehorn counters that the CO2 emissions per passenger for a suborbital space trip will be 25 per cent lower than a return flight from London to New York.

"The carbon-composite structure of WhiteKnightTwo [the mothership that carries the spacecraft up to 50,000ft] is extremely light and therefore very efficient," he says.

"It has the wingspan of a Boeing 757 but you can stand at one end and lift it."

Branson himself is a relatively new convert to the environmental cause.

Formerly a climate-change sceptic, his Damascene moment occurred when Al Gore popped round for dinner and gave him a two-hour lecture.

Since then Branson has been filled with evangelical zeal.

In 2006, as part of the Clinton Global Initiative, he pledged to direct all the profits from Virgin's transport sectors, including Virgin Atlantic – an estimated £1.5 billion over ten years – to Virgin Fuels, dedicated to developing alternative, environmentally friendly fuel sources.

But it can't be easy being an environmentalist when you own an airline; life must have been much simpler before the scales were lifted from his eyes.

"Yes, much simpler" he agrees.

Branson has also set up the Virgin Earth Challenge, which is offering a $25 million prize to anyone who comes up with a viable means of extracting CO2 out of the atmosphere.

"Every single scientific institution in the world should be working on nothing else," he says. "It's that critical."

As well as being a very public sop for his conscience, if the prize does result in a breakthrough then Branson will be perfectly placed to market it and earn a handsome profit, while at the same time coming across as the saviour of the planet.

He's quick to admit that "doing good" and "earning shedloads of cash" don't have to be mutually exclusive.

"You have to have a passion and believe you can create something you're really proud of," he says.

"But the chances are that, if it follows those criteria, an enormous number of people will be as interested and excited as you are and therefore it's likely you'll be able to pay your bills."

The next morning, Branson's press officer calls at 6:45am. "Richard is having breakfast and wondered if you'd like to join him."

Branson is waiting in the hotel restaurant in an open-necked white linen shirt. His attitude to fashion is famously laid-back.

He was once photographed wearing shoes that didn't match, and his old British Airways sparring partner Lord King sneeringly referred to him as "the grinning pullover".

His clothes today (brown jacket and jeans) are smart enough but his shoes (battered black slip-ons) look distinctly high-street.

Still, it's a step up from the early days of Virgin, when he would hold meetings with his Coutts & Co bank manager barefoot.

They once told him that, if he ever turned up wearing shoes, they knew he was after a really big loan.

Thirty-seven years on, there's still a bit of the barefoot hippy about him, even though that's at odds with running 250 companies with a combined turnover of £10 billion.

It's part of the Branson enigma. Whitehorn describes him as "ruthlessly capitalist in business but socially communist".

For the next hour, until it's time to depart for the Nastar centre, we talk about his hopes for Virgin Galactic.

At the start, Branson is surprisingly nervous and inarticulate, his speech peppered with ums, ahs and unfinished sentences, as if he gets bored with what he's saying before he's finished saying it.

He stares down into his tea, tugs nervously at his napkin and fiddles with his signet ring (worn unconventionally on the fourth finger rather than the little finger). But after a few minutes he relaxes.

His phone rings – he must be the only person in the world who still has the original Nokia ringtone – and he has a brief conversation during which he asks:

"Have you been to see the Bank of England yet?" No prizes for guessing what they're talking about.

Virgin Galactic may be the main focus today, but there is also the little matter of trying to buy a bank to be getting on with.

Are you in the middle of Northern Rock negotiations, I ask when he comes off the phone.

"Yes," he says.

"It's certainly the most complicated deal we've ever done and we're crossing our fingers it'll all get sorted soon." The conversation returns to Virgin Galactic.

Back on safer territory, Branson visibly relaxes.

He describes how in 1991 he registered the name Virgin Galactic "just for fun, because I loved the name".

But at the same time he set himself the task of meeting all the scientists who might be capable of building a re-usable space ship.

"I met some wonderful, weird people," he says.

"The best way of going into any new business is to be bold and get out there and try to make sure that if there's any breakthrough you're there for it.

"The same applies for our clean-fuel business.

"We've put ourselves up as the company that's going to come up with an alternative fuel, so anybody who does come up with an idea is likely to come to Virgin. The same applied to space travel."

So how much will it cost him? So far, Virgin has spent about £35 million, though by the time it starts making test flights it will have invested more than £50 million.

To bring the programme to commercial viability will involve a total investment of about £125 million – which sounds remarkably low when you consider that Nasa's annual budget is about £8 billion.

But will there be enough people who can afford the experience – and who feel excited enough about what is such a brief thrill – for Virgin to make money out of the venture?

"Yes," he says.

"And the dollar's gone down about 35 per cent since we set the price. So it's a great bargain for British people!

"No, seriously, there are certainly people who could afford it at that level but, obviously, to get hundreds of thousands to be able to afford it, we've got to get the price down.

"That's going to be the challenge over the next ten years.

"I've basically led my life on the basis that saying yes is a lot more fun than saying no. It's led me into some very interesting situations."

Nonetheless, Branson must be nervous. All it takes is one major setback, one unfortunate incident, and the business will be dead in the water.

"If you're pioneering something as large and exciting as this, you have to accept there are going to be knock-backs," he says.

"In attempting to go around the world in a balloon I ended up having to be pulled out of the sea five times by helicopter, so I'm not the sort of person who gives up easily.

"But because SpaceShipOne has proved it is possible to go to space and return safely three times, we know this is do-able.

"And we've got the best rocket scientists working on it. Yes, there will be horrible hiccups along the way but hopefully not too many. I'm convinced we can succeed."

He looks up, suddenly filled with visionary zeal. "I really believe we're at the birth of something big," he says. "This is just the beginning.

"We're starting with suborbital flights, and then we'll move on to orbital flights, then in time I'd hope to see a Virgin hotel just off the Moon where we can set up small spaceships that can be programmed to take guests round the Moon using the Moon's gravity."

So, in his mind's eye, does he imagine sexy, Barbarella-style flight attendants in Virgin uniform, floating around the cabin? "I have no problem fantasising about that at all," he chuckles.

"The Spaceport is going to be the sexiest building on Earth. The spaceship is going to be the sexiest spaceship ever built.

"The mothership is going to be the sexiest mothership. And yes, we may well have crew on board who will be reminiscent of Barbarella…

"There may even be cabin crew on the spaceship. It's not beyond the realms of possibility – and we've got lots of girls who've already put their hands up and said they'd love to do it."

While Virgin Galactic's job for now is simply to get punters to and from space safely, it is also researching other possibilities for the future.

Branson believes the WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo system could be used as a super-fast method of travel.

"At present the Virgin Galactic flights are suborbital," he says.

"But if we could make a bigger SpaceShipTwo, with more power on the rocket motor, we could take people beyond the Earth's atmosphere, and transport people in space. New York to Sydney could be completed in two-and-a-half hours rather than the 26 hours it now takes."

Sceptics have poured scorn on this idea, arguing that the speed necessary to punch right out of the atmosphere and reach orbit would be 17,500mph, while SpaceShipTwo's top speed is 3,500mph. But Branson is unconcerned.

Part of the secret of his success is his unflinching optimism. He never believes things will go wrong until he's dangling from the rescue helicopter rope or being lowered down the side of a building.

Branson doesn't think he's part of a space race, but there is an element of national pride at play.

"For a British company to be the one offering the world flights into space would in itself be fantastic.

"I think it can be a successful business.

"The fact that we've already got $30 million in deposits in the bank indicates that it can. And 80,000 people have already expressed an interest via the website."

On a final note, I ask him what it is about space that inspires him, 38 years after he watched the Moon landing on his fuzzy black-and-white TV in a squat in Notting Hill.

"Everything," he says. "The view, the weightlessness, the sheer majesty of it. I love to do things I've never done before. It's certainly the biggest thing Virgin's ever done – and it's my biggest adventure." Visit virgingalactic.com