- There's a very good chance that there's some kind of life.

Now it might not be like life like you, that can build, you know, beautiful cars and spaceships and everything like that.

But it would be some kind of life on other planets.

- [Announcer] Today on Tech Rides, take a ride with George Whitesides of Virgin Galactic.

George is a former Chief of Staff for NASA and led Richard Branson's company, working to develop commercial space life for 10 years.

We ride an range Rover V8 from Las Cruses, New Mexico, to the beautiful Spaceport America and discuss the future of commercial space travel.

When we filmed this episode a few years ago, George was a CEO for Virgin Galactic, and they were just beginning to move their operations from Mojave, California to Spaceport in preparation for their first commercial flights.

Today, George serves as the Chairman for Virgin Galactic's Space Advisory Board.

Galactic completed their first manned commercial space flight in the summer of 2021.

We pick up the conversation on our ride to Spaceport, America.

(upbeat music) - The test range that we're about to get to, the White Sand's Missile Range, is a key part of the American civil and military technology, you know, establishment, right?

And so they test all kinds of things, you know, rockets, new types of propulsion, different types of weapons, all kinds of different things in this site.

And the spaceport is sort of tucked inside the restricted airspace of the White Sands Missile Range.

Launches can be done without disturbing any of the surrounding commercial air traffic, right?

So we don't wanna disturb the commercial air traffic.

- Right.

- And what they have here is something that's pretty special.

It's air space that's restricted from the surface all the way up to infinity, all the way to space.

There's very few places like that on the planet, but in the United States in particular.

When the state of New Mexico wanted to create a commercial space port, which was an idea that was around long before Virgin Galactic.

It seemed to make like a lot of sense to be conducting ongoing operations here in New Mexico.

But the main thing is that the state, you know, way back, over 10 years ago, decided to make a big bet on commercial space and build this thing called Spaceport America.

So they have created the world's first commercial spaceport here in Southern New Mexico.

- And they did this before you were gonna come here, right?

So they didn't, did they even know it was Virgin Galactic, well you were in operation by then, or started to build a program?

- We had just started and basically there was a handshake deal between the governor at the time and Richard Branson, which basically said, governor said, you know, if you build a spaceship system, I will build a spaceport.

And Richard said, if you build a spaceport, I'm gonna build a spaceship.

And, you know, they shook hands because they're, you know.

- So when they built it, when they decided to go ahead, they had Virgin Galactic as like.

- They had us.

- As like the anchor tenant.

- Yeah.

We'd actually signed a deal to be the anchor tenant of the Spaceport.

It's a really fascinating area to be a part of and we're excited to bring, you know, what we hope will be and it's revolution in opening up space, you know, to people, to Southern New Mexico.

(upbeat music) And then there's the whole technology side, right?

Like I just had dinner last night with the head of the New Mexico State University system.

And we were talking about how, you know, if we're flying to space every week or, you know, multiple times a week, you know, there's gonna be this great opportunity for science and technology to happen, you know, so.

- Right.

- People will be shipping their experiments down to NMSU, down to the Spaceport to get processed, to go into space, you know, on a weekly basis, right?

- Yeah, yeah.

- Like, you know, we've never had that with space, right?

What happens with space and what do we call space, space launches are typically referred to as campaigns, you know?

And what do you think of when you think of a campaign?

I think of like climbing a mountain, you know.

It's like, you don't know exactly when it's gonna happen.

It's gonna be really hard, really difficult and expensive.

- Right.

- And we wanna change that paradigm so that it's more like getting on an airplane, you know?

- Yeah.

- I think the promise of what we're are starting here is highly reusable space flight, right?

Vehicle that can operate, not just one time, not just five times, or a dozen times, but a vehicle that can operate hundreds of times or even thousands of times, you know?

- Right.

- And that's revolutionary.

- [Edwin] So you've been at Virgin Galactic for nine years.

- [George] That's right, nine years.

- And before that you were with NASA, right?

- That's right.

- You were the chief.

- [Both] Chief of staff.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

How long were you there?

- I was there for a couple years, basically the first couple of years of the Obama Administration.

I did a little bit of advising of the Obama campaign on space issues.

- Okay.

- With some other people, I was not the only person by any means, but, and then there's something called the transition team.

So when a new president gets elected, there's a transition team that comes in in advance of his or her inauguration.

- Right.

- To sort of like say, okay, here's the situation.

You know like.

- Yeah.

- Here's the straight scoop on this or that agency.

Now NASA is of course like a national jewel, right?

- Right.

- So they did a great job with transition, gave us lot of this, all this information.

And then when the president nominated the guy who was gonna run NASA, Charlie Boldon, I helped run his nomination process.

- Okay.

- Or his confirmation process, rather.

(upbeat music) - So have you always been a rocket scientist?

- I've a always been a space geek.

I will say that, you know, I mean, you know, since I was a little kid, I've wanted to go into space and I'm still very inspired by space.

And I'm inspired about how I think space, sort of in many ways, represents the best of humanity.

There are other things that are great about humanity, but you know, like what do, I mean?

I mean, you know, space is a place where we can show courage, high technology, cooperation, also competition, you know, which I think is also the best of humanity in some ways, or represents the best of humanity.

You know, inspiration, understanding, science, you know, like great stuff.

And yeah, so I'm still inspired by those things.

(upbeat music) Okay and by the way, there's the Spaceport.

Over there, sorry.

- Oh, wow.

- So, yeah, just rising out.

You see how it just like rises out of the environment, you know?

- Yeah, that's awesome.

- Yeah, it's pretty cool.

- It kind of blends in and you could almost it's kind of the color of a lot of the terrain.

- And that was the point, you know, was like Foster didn't wanna design some like huge thing that like wrecked the landscape, you know?

- Right, right.

- He wanted something that, because it's a such a beautiful landscape here, right.

- It is.

- You know, he wanted something that could sort of blend, but also be distinctive, but blend, you know what I mean?

- Yes.

- And I think he really succeeded.

- Yeah, that's, it's gorgeous.

- It's just, and as you get closer, it's obviously bigger.

I mean, you know, and more beautiful and everything.

We'll get a chance to drive around and experience it.

- So you mentioned, just a minute ago, you were talking about the Apollo Mission.

- Yeah.

- And so we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of that flight to the moon, that first flight to the moon.

- Yeah.

- Which was an incredible accomplishment.

- Yeah.

- And then between then and now, we've had the Space Shuttle program.

- Yeah.

- And, but then that's kind of shut down, but.

- Yeah.

- It seems in a way like between, I mean, 50 years.

- [George] Yeah.

- Not a lot has really happened.

I mean, what's your sense?

I mean, for me thinking about it, I mean, yeah we had the Space Shuttle, but outside of that, there hasn't been a lot, you know we haven't, we've had some, I guess, the Mars Rover.

- Right.

- And probes and stuff.

- Right.

- How do you, you see it?

Like how, what's your sense of the last 50 year between then and now?

- Well, it's interesting.

It's sort of like a lot has happened.

And also we have not exceeded Apollo in a way, you know what I mean?

It's clear that Apollo was this weird historical anomaly.

Like we did Apollo earlier than we should have in a way.

I mean, that's not to say that we shouldn't have done Apollo, it's just like Apollo was not predictable.

It was this sort of weird concatenation of geopolitical competition and all this stuff and.

But on the other hand, like a lot has happened, right?

You know, I mean, you know, the robotic exploration program has done incredible things, right?

Like visited every planet in the solar system, you know, all these moons, you know, we've got all these amazing probes going everywhere.

- Wait, talk, the robotic probe has visited every planet?

- Yeah, I mean, not necessarily landing, but like, you know, flying by.

- Okay.

- Or you know, and like we finally ticked off the last one when we went to Pluto recently, you know.

- Okay, so those are not manned.

- Not manned, right, yeah, so, I mean just unmanned probes or uncrewed probes.

You know, so the robotic program has done amazing things and you know, the human program has done amazing things too, but not as much in sort of setting new boundaries for human exploration, right?

So, you know, building the International Space Station, which is this massive massive program.

- Right.

- You know, this huge object is flying above our heads, but it wasn't exploration.

And so people don't maybe focus on it much, but I mean the International Space Station is an incredible achievement.

All this innovation going on in commercial space right now is driving down the cost of space access.

And, you know, that's the key to opening up the solar system, right?

- Yeah.

- If we can make it cheaper to get into space, then we can do so much more, right?

- Right.

- And so what we're doing, what Elon and Jeff are doing, you know, like these are things that are gonna drive down the cost of space access, and that's gonna open up the universe to us.

So that's really exciting right now.

And that's what I'm saying to these kids that are going into aerospace right now.

Like, you are just darn lucky because it is the best possible moment to go into this stuff.

You know, they're gonna have a career where, you know, we're gonna develop fully reusable space vehicles, you know, and that's gonna drop the cost of access by a factor of a hundred, you know, and then imagine what you can do with that.

You're gonna have robotic probes, you know, going all over the solar system, exploring things, figuring out whether there's any life on Mars or Europa or Enceladus, you know, these are different places where there's potentially some kind of life in our solar system.

- Right.

- And you know, and you're gonna have hundreds and then eventually thousands, tens of thousands of people going into space.

And that's gonna have a fundamental impact on the planet when, you know, when being an astronaut becomes something that, you know, almost anybody, and somebody will know somebody who's been in space, you know.

(upbeat music) - We were talking about what's happened in the last 50 years and I think one of the things that really has exploded, and I think it's kind of under the radar so to speak, but how many satellites are in space.

- Yeah.

- And you know, when we first met, right, I met with Dan Hart, who's the CEO of your sister company, Virgin Orbit.

- Yeah.

- And I was really fascinated to learn like how much is going on in that world and how competitive that is between nation states.

- Oh yeah, super competitive, super competitive.

I mean, there's just like, I mean, there are a lot of launch vehicles getting developed right now, you know, and there are a lot of small launch vehicles being developed right now, but the thing that's really driving it is this revolution in small satellites, you know, because people can now build a satellite, you know, that just it's like the size of your toaster and it can do amazing things, right?

You know, and if you put two toasters together, then you could do even more things.

- So Virgin Orbit is almost like your enterprise business to business company.

And this is like the commercial consumer, Virgin Galactic is the consumer business.

- Yeah, that's exactly right.

And that's actually why we spun Virgin Orbit out, right?

Because Virgin Orbit was for about five or, you know, six years was part of Galactic.

But then we realized it was a fundamentally different business, right?

One was B2B, one was B2C and they realized sort of we're different, different things.

- And you have a third company, the Spaceship Company.

- Yeah, yeah.

So the Spaceship Company is really meant to be sort of the Boeing, if you will, you know, building spaceships for the operator, Virgin Galactic.

So Virgin Galactic is sort of like the American Airlines or the Virgin Atlantic Airlines, obviously our preferred partner or Virgin Australia.

And they use vehicles that are, that's built by the Spaceship Company, which is, you know, this entity that we set up and built from scratch really.

And now it's building, you know, real vehicles from scratch.

- Right.

We're talking a minute ago about the other companies, Blue Origin.

- Yeah.

- Which is Jeff Bezos' company and Elon Musk company Spaceship X.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And their approach is a little bit different than what you're doing, right.

How, what they're trying and how they're doing it.

- Yeah.

- Can you talk a little bit about that?

- Sure, yeah.

So, I mean, I think from a market perspective, those companies are more focused on big satellites and orbital crude launch, you know, so sending people into orbit.

We are more focused on smaller packages and these sort of suborbital flights into space and back.

- Okay.

- So they're sort of different markets, although there's a bit of overlap with part of what Jeff Bezos is trying to do.

What we're focused on is horizontal launch, horizontal landing using winged vehicles for that sort of initial bit.

And coming up and back down.

- And why that different design?

- Well, it's just, you know, it's a different architecture.

They're pros and cons of both, right?

So for orbital flight, eventually, you know, an orbital rocket is the right thing to do.

For a flight that's suborbital like we're doing, then we think wings vehicles are good in that respect.

It's not to say that that either of the architectures are really intrinsically bad.

They're both just, they're just different, you know?

And so having a runway takeoff, runway landing is nice because you have sort of lower GS on the takeoff and landing.

(upbeat music) Here we are.

- Oh, this is pretty cool.

- Yeah.

- Is this the entrance right here.

- This is the entrance, yeah, so.

- That's awesome.

- So welcome to Spaceport America.

You know, this is a historic, amazing place here.

You know.

- I love that sculpture.

- [George] Little bit of sculpture here, yeah.

It's gorgeous and.

- Flags, what's the yellow flag.

- So that's the state flag of New Mexico.

- Oh, really?

- It's a beautiful, beautiful flag.

- I mean, it looks.

Are you are a fan of Close Encounters.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- Huge fan.

- 'Cause when I look at it, I don't know, reminds me of one of those ships from Close Encounters in a way.

- Yeah, it does have a vaguely saucer-esque.

So you turn in there, welcome to Spaceport America.

You can see our Spaceport mock up there.

- That's a model out there, okay.

- And yeah.

And we'll just pull up here and show the badges.

- [Guard] Morning.

- Hi, good morning, how are you?

- Hello.

- [Guard] How y'all doing?

- We're doing good.

Yeah.

Sorry, - [George] Let me just grab that Spaceport badge and we'll scan it for you real quick.

- Oh, sorry, thanks.

- [Edwin] This is fantastic.

- Yeah, welcome to Spaceport.

Oh look, a rocket just went off.

- Oh, awesome.

- Right over there.

- Yeah.

- Sorry, this, you know, that's what happens at a spaceport?

- So George really enjoyed the ride over here with you.

And now we're just standing out here in front of the gorgeous spaceport in this beautiful terrain.

You know, last time we were together, we were in Mojave, that's where you've been working and building the ships for the last 10 years and maybe longer probably.

- Yeah.

- And now you've begun to move your operations from Mojave to New Mexico.

How many people are you gonna transition?

Are you gonna keep Mojave open over once that's fully?

Is it gonna be two sites or are you gonna have a full transition that everybody comes here.

- So we're gonna have about 150 people here, maybe a bit more.

And we're moving a hundred people from Mojave down to New Mexico over the course of the next few months.

- And how many total people are in the company working on this mission?

- Well, we got about, I would say order of magnitude 650 direct employees.

- Are you gonna continue to do R and D, research engineering in Mojave as well?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, the vision of our company is to start out doing these flights up to space and back from here, but you know, longer term, what we really hope to do is to use the technologies of these spaceships and apply them to point to point travel.

So we go high speed, point to point.

We're actually the only company in the world flying people on mach three journeys right now.

You know, the only company in the world.

- So, I wanna talk about the space profile, the actual, so you're gonna have your astronauts, your future astronauts and how many, wait, how many future astronauts do you have?

- [George] We have over 600.

- 600 people have signed up right now and.

- Yeah.

- And they'll be the first ones to start going and walk me through the flight profile.

- Yeah.

So, well, so first of all, you'll come down to Spaceport America here in New Mexico, you know, three or four days before your space flight, right?

And so you'll go through three days of training in the spaceport.

So we're gonna give you, you know, everything, you need to have the most incredible experience of your life when you go to space, you know, and we're gonna be telling you about how you move around the cabin, you know, what to expect when, you're gonna be meeting your other crew members.

You know, the other future astronauts who are flying on the flight, and you're gonna be learning about safety stuff and you'll be thinking about, you know, what do you actually want to do when you get up into space?

You know, all that stuff, really important stuff.

So you'll do that for three days.

And then on the fourth day, you'll fly to space.

And so what's gonna happen is you'll have a really special moment when you're walking out of the spaceport, and we're gonna drive you down to the end of the runway where the spaceship will be waiting that morning, early in the morning, you get on board the spaceship, and we're gonna take off from this runway right here, go up into this beautiful New Mexican sky and then we'll do a loop where we get the mothership up to the right altitude.

So getting close to 50,000 feet, a little under 50,000 feet.

And then when we're, you know, almost quite close to being over the spaceport, not quite but close to it, the vehicle will release from the mothership.

So it'll separate out.

The rocket motor will light and you will suddenly be going very fast.

You know, once that rocket motor lights.

- How fast?

What's the top speed?

- Well you get up to about, you get up past mach three, but you're past mach one in less than 10 seconds.

So imagine, you know, many cars go, you know, zero to 10 and whatever, we're going zero to 10 mach one, you know, actually faster.

So, that'll be quite exciting.

And the pilot will execute a turn.

So you're going straight up into space.

And then that rocket motor will burn for a bit.

And then once it goes out, you will feel weightlessness inside of the cabin, you know, like free fall basically.

And so you'll be floating around the cabin.

You'll be able to get outta your seat, you know, experience the joy and the awe of weightlessness.

But more to the point, you'll be looking down at planet Earth and, you know, having that incredible experience of being outside of planet Earth, you know, and everything that that entails.

And then, you know, after a few minutes, the pilot will say, okay, get back in your seat, you get back in your seat.

And then you'll reenter right over the spaceport and do some loops, basically, gliding loops, sort of like the space shuttle.

- [Edwin] Right.

- [George] And then you'll just come to a smooth runway landing here at Spaceport America.

- Okay, then there's this process, right?

You have this design where like the, the feathers system.

- Yeah, so basically we have this thing, it's almost like a badminton shuttlecock.

So, you know how, like when you hit the shuttlecock, it always sort of points downward on the way down.

- Right, right.

- It's the same kind of principle, basically the aerodynamics and the center of gravity orient that shuttlecock, and also our spaceship so that it's always going sort of downside down, you know.

Which is important because, you know, reentry into the earth's atmosphere is always a crucial part of any spaceship journey, right?

- Right.

- So what this does is it enables us to have a very stable reentry back into the Earth's atmosphere.

And in fact, the pilots could literally take their hands off of the controls and it would just reenter naturally and safely.

And then once you get back down into the atmosphere, so sort of 60, 50,000 feet, then the wings sort of bend back down and it just becomes like a normal plane, like a glider and it's just gliding back down to this runway here.

- What's been the most difficult thing in for you to kind of deal with and solve?

- Well, the challenge, technically the biggest challenge was probably the rocket motor.

So when I got on board here, we were having some significant challenges with the rocket motor and so what we did was, you know, we hired some great, really great technical experts and, you know, they solved the challenges and you know, now it's working super great, you know, it's just a, this very stable, very safe, very simple propulsion system.

We think that there's a magic to simplicity.

In general, simplicity is a pathway towards safety.

And because of that, we think it's actually probably the simplest human rocket motor ever flown, you know, meant for human passengers.

- Right, right.

- And one of the cool things about being able to turn off the rocket motor once we get to space is that it means we're gonna have like this super quiet, really beautiful, peaceful experience when they're in space.

Like the footage of our actual flights to space, which we did earlier this year, you know, once our rocket motor ends, it's a very tranquil experience.

You know, there's a couple of, you know, hissing noises when the, basically we use these thrusters to orient the ship when we're in space, but once we're stopped using those, it's like super quiet, which I think will be a really amazing experience for our customers.

- You had a pretty major setback about five years ago.

One of your test flights, didn't go well, it crashed.

- Yeah.

So we had an accident when basically we were, our contractor, which was, we were using a contractor at the time and as they were conducting a test flight for us on the way up, yeah.

They, there was a pilot error basically.

And it caused an accident.

- What's the biggest lesson you've learned from that experience, of that setback?

- Well, I mean, you know, there are a lot of different lessons.

One is that, you know, it's the responsibility of all us, you know, safety is the responsibility of all of us.

And we need to make a vehicle that, you know, we feel comfortable going on ourselves, right?

And so, you know, I'm gonna fly on it.

My wife is gonna fly on it.

You can design the heck out of it, but until you actually fly it, that you sort of thought of everything.

And so even though that accident was tragic, and we continue to think about the folks who were affected by it, it made the ship safer, you know?

And so, you know, the Gulf Stream 650 had an accident shortly before it went into commercial operations.

It made that ship safer and, you know and other vehicles have had accidents during the test flight program.

And that's why, you know, we venerate test pilots, right?

Because these are brave people, men and women who put their lives on the line to make vehicles safe for other people to utilize.

- You mentioned that you want to fly on it.

You're gonna take your wife on it.

- Yeah.

- I know Richard Branson, he wants to be, I think one of the first people to do the commercial flights.

- Yeah.

- The accident, obviously, it's a reminder that what you're doing here is really hard.

- Yeah.

- It's not, it's really challenging.

It's one of the greatest challenges you can have is space flight in terms of an engineering problem.

And safety's the most important thing.

You mentioned earlier that the view the astronauts will have will be about a three to five minute experience.

- [George] Yeah, that's right.

- [Edwin] Do you plan to do longer in the future?

Is that gonna go longer over time?

- Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we will, over time, potentially expand that a bit.

The only thing that we're constrained by is we don't want it to, the G's to be too hard on the way back in.

- Right.

- And so if you go up too high, then it might be a little uncomfortable for people inside.

And so we wanna measure that, so that it's as high as we can reasonably go but so that almost anybody can actually fly physically.

So that's the primary constraint.

Now, once we start going point to point, we're gonna be flying, you know, for an hour, you know, or something like that.

So you'll have the amazing view for a while.

- If you look out in the next 25 years or so, maybe even 50 years, what do you think happens in space travel, especially now that it's become a private enterprise and it seems like there's a lot more movement into space and what do, how do you, what do you see as the future?

- Well, there's gonna be a lot of really amazing stuff happening.

I mean, number one, I think obviously, parochially, I think it's gonna be incredible that thousands of people are gonna be able to go into space, right?

So, we're gonna mint, other people will mint, you know, thousands of astronauts, right?

So that's a really fundamental change because that experience of looking down on the planet, looking at the planet from outside, I think is a profound one.

- [Edwin] There's only been like.

- [George] And it's gonna have a big impact.

- There's only been, excuse me, about what 500 people so far.

- Exactly, like 571 or thereabouts have been to space.

So it's, which is a really small number when you think about it, right.

That's not that many people who have actually been to space.

So that's gonna be a profound shift.

NASA is setting out a program where we will go back to the moon and eventually to Mars.

And so, you know, within that timeframe, people will, I'm sure go to the moon and Mars, you know, so the first woman on the moon, first man and woman on Mars, those will be really exciting milestones.

And what we will be able to do over the coming decades is to start to detect biosignatures around those planets.

You know, we can look at their atmospheric composition and we can see things like oxygen or methane or whatever.

And in certain planets, that will be an indication that there is probably life there.

You know, you can't say for sure, but you can say there's a very good chance that there's some kind of life.

Now, it might not be like life like you, that can build, you know, beautiful cars and spaceships and everything like that.

But it would be some kind of life on other planets.

And so I think within the next 50 years, I think that's very possible that we could make those discoveries.

- You guys have been working on this for 15 years.

You've been with Galactic for nine years.

What are you most looking forward to?

What are you most excited about?

- What I'm looking forward to most of all is, you know, we have this amazing collection of future astronaut customers, right?

And these are people who have, in many cases, dreamed about going to space for their entire lives.

You know, for example, there's one lady who was actually sort of soft selected by NASA in the early years of NASA.

- Yeah.

- To fly to space, but wasn't, actually not integrated into the astronaut program.

So this is somebody who's actually been wanting to go to space for like literally 50 years, you know?

- Right, right.

- And, you know, fulfilling the dream of those people, helping those people achieve their dream.

- Yeah.

- You know, is gonna be absolutely fantastic, right?

You know, to have them do something that many of them thought that they would never have that opportunity, right?

And we're gonna actually make that possible for them.

That's the thing that I most look forward to.

- So look, hey, George, I've had such a great time with you today.

I've had, you know, riding in the Range Rover and our chat on the way here and in this beautiful setting in New Mexico, coming up to the spaceport.

It's been the time in my life.

And you know, every time I meet with you guys and talk to you about it, I'm a little closer to like to wanting to sign up myself, - Do it, do it.

It's gonna be great.

- Hey, thank you so much again.

- Thank you.

- It's been really a pleasure, a lot of fun.

- Thank you, it's been a lot of fun.

Appreciate it.

- Let's go, let's go ride back.

(upbeat music)