Our conversation revolved around Virgin Galactic's latest milestone on its journey towards ferrying

HD Mobile Alt Announcements Cameras Cellphones Desktops Displays Gaming GPS Handhelds Home Entertainment Household Internet Laptops Meta Misc Networking Peripherals Podcasts Robots Portable Audio/Video Science Software Storage Tablets Transportation Wearables Wireless
It's been a particularly good week for Sir Richard Branson. SpaceShipTwo , Virgin Galactic's sub-orbital peoplecarrier broke the sound barrier for the first time, and Virgin America began service into San Jose, California. Sir Richard was in town to welcome VA's first San Jose arrival, and we jumped at the chance to chat with him, even if only for a few minutes.
Our conversation revolved around Virgin Galactic's latest milestone on its journey lowest price airline tickets towards ferrying the masses to the stars. Naturally, we wanted to know his plan to make space travel affordable for us non-billionaires, as the current cost of a Virgin Galactic ticket is a cool $200K quarter million dollars. His solution? A combination of more spacecraft, more spaceports and the most prolific satellite delivery service in history.
We'll be into space before the end of the year, and we'll be taking passengers -- subject to getting, you know, FAA certification and everything -- early next year. So, the day before yesterday was truly important and truly historic. You know it's all very well building a rocket, it's all very well building a spaceship, but if the two don't work together you've got a problem. And once you've gone 1,000MPH, gone 4,000MPH or 3,000MPH, we can pretty well extrapolate it up. So, you know, it was an enormous milestone. [We] talk as if we're going to space every year for the last seven years, but now, I can properly say, "We are going to space this year."
Look, we're building a commercial spaceship company, the first ever. A lot of businesses -- let's say they mass-launch a new car, and they have a few technical problems, they can cope with that. With a spaceship company, you can't afford to have technical problems. And so we've got to get every single little lowest price airline tickets thing 100 percent right, 100 percent safe. We can't afford to lose any customers, and so we've just got to do test flight, after test flight, after test flight until we really feel... lowest price airline tickets until I feel comfortable enough lowest price airline tickets to bring my kids up, and then we can be confident to take other people's kids up.
Yes. Up to our first thousand customers, the price actually is going up now to $250,000. They help us effectively fund the program. They're the people who can afford to pay it, and we're enormously appreciative lowest price airline tickets of their support. lowest price airline tickets But in the years to come, we will get the price down, and our aim is to, you know, by the time you get to an age where you want to go to space, you'll be able to afford it, and by the time your children want to go to space, they'll be able to afford it. So, I don't want to forecast prices and things; lowest price airline tickets we're going to try to make it as affordable to as many people as possible.
The key to that has to be a lot more spacecraft. And there's also a new rocket we're developing which is a reusable rocket, which is a very clean, very, very, very clean rocket. And, you know, it uses really a small amount of energy to get people up there. Also, maybe more space ports. We've got our first spaceport in New Mexico. We may have to think of other spaceports. We're also going to be able to put more satellites in space in one month -- three and a half thousand satellites in one month -- than have been put up in the last 10 years. So, and I don't want to speculate what that could achieve, but if you could put your thinking hat on, it could be transformative in a whole lot of industries, and that, the economics lowest price airline tickets from that will help us get the price of tickets down.
We're great friends. lowest price airline tickets We're both doing our own thing. We will be putting low-earth orbit satellites up, which personally we think is the future, he's putting bigger satellites up further. And I think we can create a whole new industry from the back of being able to put satellites up at a very affordable price because we can replenish those satellites within 24 hours. So, you know, if after five years one or two of them start falling lowest price airline tickets out, we can just, you know, within 24 hours send up our mother ship. Send them to the specific places. That's not been possible before. People have had to wait a year in line to put satellites up. So it is going to be transformative.
Ouya launch delayed to June 25, controller defect being fixed Jack the Reaper harvests all the souls, looks adorable while doing it Student film 'Brothers Rapture' revisits BioShock's underwater city
Pinterest 'Pins It Forward' In The U.K. With A Localizing Campaign As It Ramps Up Its International Strategy Line Reports Q1 2013 Earnings Of $58.9M: Half From Game In-App Purchases, lowest price airline tickets 30% From Stickers, 80% From Japan Reports: Facebook Is Buying Social Mapping/Traffic App Waze For Up To $1B To Court Mobile Users