Sir Richard Branson, Founder, Virgin Group delivers the keynote address to the 2019 Air Space & Cyber Conference
Transcript
Now, without further delay, we are ready to welcome our keynote speaker. Please roll the video. (inspiring music)
I’m a person that looks forward more than looks back. When I started 50 years ago as an entrepreneur, the word entrepreneur, I don’t think existed.
[Man] The airline’s the brainchild of Richard Branson, 34-year-old billionaire, head of the Virgin Records empire.
I think an entrepreneur is somebody that creates something that makes a positive difference to other people’s lives. (upbeat music) (cheering) I’m a born optimist, a very positive person. Both my children inherited that from me. And I was very lucky, I had a very happy childhood. One of the things I enjoy the most is teaching people to swim. You shouldn’t sink, Bishop, you just go. I find it quite an easy thing to do and it’s wonderfully satisfying to help them stand on their own two feet. (cheering) That was brilliant.
Why do you have so much money? (laughing)
The exciting thing about learning to be an entrepreneur is then later on in life, you can be creating not-for-profit businesses, not-for-profit things to try to deal with the problems of the world. I’ve been lucky enough to help create The Elders which is a wonderful group of people that are trying to tackle conflict resolution issues in the world.
The Elders can become a fiercely independent and robust force for good.
The Oceanic Elders to try to tackle the problems of the oceans. The carbon ones try to tackle climate change. My attitude in life is to give everything I can to solve the problem. And trying to go to space has been tough, very tough. You know the old saying, it’s not rocket science? Well, obviously if you’re trying to go to space, it is rocket science. I get enormous satisfaction trying to achieve something that has never been achieved before. My favorite phrase to all the people around me is, screw it, just get on and do it. (audience applauding)
[Interviewer] See, we don’t have Virgin water. I don’t know why we don’t this morning.
Actually that’s a good idea. (laughing) We’ll get that sorted for next time.
Thank you for coming. We really appreciate your willingness to fly all the way across the ocean to join us this morning. And this is an Air Space and Cyber conference. I think that means that a lot of people would like to know about space. And I notice in your bio, that you have been working space for a very long time. Tell us about how you got involved.
Well, first of all, it’s a great honor to be here and thank you for the invite. So the first time space really captivated me was when I was about 17-years-old and watched the moon landing. I think maybe the two of us are old enough to remember it and it was on a little black-and-white T.V. set. And I thought, I’ll be going to space one day. This is something really to look forward to. Anyway, decade by decade went along and I then got a call from President Gorbachev, who was trying to reach out to the rest of the world from Russia, inviting me to go to space on one of his spaceships. And, of course, I immediately said yes. But then his millions, they declare it was $50 million. (laughing) So I decided to drop that idea. And then I started heading around the world to see if we could find some genius engineers to build spaceships, to enable myself and I believe most people would love the chance to go to space if they could afford it. And I came across someone called Burt Rutan who is one of those aviation engineering geniuses and we got involved with SpaceShipOne with him and Paul Allen. And now we’ve had an incredible year. We’ve had five people into space this year, five new astronauts created, which is the first new astronauts created since 2009. And yeah, it’s been very exciting. We might just show a quick video of where we are with Virgin Galactic if that’s all right.
[Interviewer] It’d be great, thank you.
[JFK Voiceover] The exploration of space will go ahead and it is one of the great adventures of all time.
[Mission Control] Spaceship Unity, welcome to space.
[Astronaut] Copy, base, million-dollar view.
[Woman] Humans have managed to learn so much about the universe in such a relatively small time frame, compared with the life of the universe. That was always very incredible to me. (dramatic music)
Our mission is to lower the barrier to getting into orbit so that businesses and entrepreneurs, universities and countries can bring capabilities into space that help us here on Earth.
As a species, we’ve traveled around our planet at the same speed for the last 50 to 60 years. And the SpaceShipTwo is going to be the first space plane, that on a regular basis flies humans faster than three times the speed of sound.
By bringing hundreds and eventually thousands of people into space, they’ll get a different perspective on life and on our future that will have a profound impact on how humanity faces it’s toughest problems.
[Richard Voiceover] Together, we can make space accessible in a way that has only been dreamt of before now. And by doing that, we can truly bring positive change to life on Earth. (dramatic music)
[Woman] Have you ever thought about going into space, Richard?
I’d love to go into space. I think there could be nothing nicer. So if you’re building a spacecraft, I’d love to come with you on it.
So, are you planning to fly yourself soon? (audience applauding)
I absolutely, I’m planning to fly myself, yes. And it won’t be long now. We’re just moving the whole operation to New Mexico where they built a beautiful space port there. And we’ll do a few more final test flights and then I’ll go up. And then we’ll put about 700 people who signed up to go up with us. We’ll start putting them up. How many people in the audience would like to go to space one day. Yeah, I wasn’t surprised in this particular audience.
[Interviewer] Bring your credit card. (laughing)
Yeah, no, our challenge is to get the price down to a level that people can save up to do it, or maybe fly lots of times on Virgin Atlantic and get the frequent flyer program to do it. (laughing) And the more spaceships we build, the more we’ll be able to bring the price down. You know, interestingly, when people crossed the Atlantic in the 1920s, the price was about the same as it is to put somebody in space today on Virgin Galactic. But decade by decade, the price came down. So, now a lot of people can afford to fly across the Atlantic and want to do the same, if possible.
[Interviewer] So one of the things that I find interesting is that you actually started Virgin Galactic, I think around 2003 or ’04 and now it’s 2019. What had been the struggles to get from where you were, to where you are today? As I mentioned in that introduction film, space is difficult. And much more difficult than I thought when I started in 2003. I didn’t expect to be sitting here today saying, we’re about to go to space. I thought we would have gone a few years ago. So, first of all, building rockets that are 100% safe, that you can just use time and time and time again and know that you’re not gonna have an incident. Obviously building a mothership to take the spaceship up. So we built the largest carbon composite plane ever built, our mothership Eve, to carry the spaceship up to 40,000 feet before we released it. The spaceship itself. I mean, it’s got to withstand three and a half thousand miles per hour in less than eight seconds. And so, again, it’s got to be strong and capable of going 60 or 70 miles into space. And then you’ve got to have brave test pilots who have to try to find out what could go wrong in space that you can’t really test on the ground. And in the process, we actually lost one pilot who made a tiny, tiny error that we’ve now made sure the spaceship can’t make that tiny error. And, of course, that sets things back enormously. But yeah, we’re now at an exciting time.
So when do you take off in your SpaceShipTwo? How long do you actually get to be in space?
So the whole roundtrip is about three hours. One day, we’ll extend it into putting people into orbit, but the price thing goes up dramatically. So what we think is that the people want to become astronauts, they want to look back at the Earth in massive big windows, they want to be able to float around. They want to go into space. And the experience, the extra cost of putting somebody into orbit, we think most likely won’t be economical. And so I think we’ve got the right balance. And maybe one day, sir, with your knee that you’ve just pulled, we could get you to float around. You won’t have to worry about the knee.
Might be a lot easier. A number of people have talked about sending people from New York to Paris through space. Is that economically feasible? Have you looked at that?
I think it is and once we’ve finished this program, we’re going to be working hard on that as an option. And there are one or two other companies, in fact, I think there’s one in the room today, who are seriously looking at at least, for five times the speed of sound. Obviously if you actually go into orbit, you’re talking about traveling at 18-and-a-half thousand miles an hour, and you can get anywhere in the world in an hour. And the only problem is gonna be getting through the airport. (laughing) Unless you parachute out.
[Interviewer] Have you experienced our TSA yet?
I think we’ve all experienced that.
Before I can tell you, let me mention, we have microphones in the aisles. Sir Richard has said he would be happy to take questions. We want to talk for a bit longer, but if you’d like to ask a question, if you want to cue up behind the microphones, I’m trying to be British today. Cue up and we’d be happy to take some questions. So, if you have them, why don’t you start doing that and we’ll chat a little bit more about satellites. We’ve talked a bit about people. One of the things that worries the defense department a lot is the Chinese ability and the Russian ability to shoot satellites out of the orbit or to disable them in various ways. And one of the responses is Responsive Launch which you are working with at Virgin Orbit. Talk a bit about Virgin Orbit. How did you get into that and where do you see that going?
So, our thinking behind Virgin Orbit was that, at present, if you want to put a satellite into space and you’re in America, there are two places you can launch from. And generally speaking, it takes about six months to eight months to get a slot. And obviously, having only two places, it’s quite vulnerable to attack as well. So our thinking with Virgin Orbit was first of all, let’s use Virgin Orbit to put a bigger ray of satellites around the world to connect the four billion people who are not connected. And with lower orbit satellites, they fall out of the sky every four of five years. So the fact that we can takeoff and launch a new satellite within 24 hours of a satellite falling out, means there need be almost no disruption to a network. The second thing is from a military point of view, where there to be a conflict in the Middle East and somebody knocked out all the satellites in that area, by having a 747, which we use, it’s actually called Cosmic Girl. And it was Cosmic Girl when it flew for Virgin Atlantic once. And so quite appropriate, we took it out of Virgin Atlantic and put it into Virgin Orbit. But by having a 747 that can just takeoff at four or five hours notice, have a rocket attached under the wing, drop it and put a new satellite into space, hopefully it will be a deterrent to an enemy state to knockout satellites in the first place. If they know that America or Great Britain has the capability of replacing satellites within 24 hours, hopefully you won’t get the cyber war in space that we all fear. And obviously space is critical to communications. And so we’ve been working for many years, developing Virgin Orbit. We had our first drop test of a rocket a couple of months ago, which I’ll show you in a second. And in about six weeks, eight weeks, we’ll be firing the engines on the next drop test and heading at 18-and-a-half miles an hour around the Earth in Orbit, beginning to drop off satellites. So for both Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit, it’s an exciting time. But let us give people a quick look at Virgin Orbit. (dramatic music)
[Man] Cosmic 101, Orbit Base, we have lock on.
[Man] To Base TD, we are turning up with the old pass. Leveling off at flight level 3-0-0. Are you ready to come into terminal count?
[Man] Yes, M-16 is go from terminal count.
[Man] Are you go for terminal count?
[Man] Okay, we are go for terminal count. LA-2 please proceed through terminal count.
[Man] To base, LA-1 rocket is now an internal power.
[Man] This is DeliOne. Currently alternating at 1555.
[Man] And for all operators, Cosmic Girl is on the northern leg of it’s podcast. Approximately 40 seconds. All operators, Cosmic Girl makes it’s final turn into the southern.
[Woman] Going in three, two, one, now. Release, release, release.
[Man] We released, making release. Control be advised, we have released. Control, this is LD, we do have a report of a clean release. (audience applauding)
Thank you very much. So the good thing is that 747s, believe it or not, do not cost very much these days.
Would you like a B52?
I’ve rung out Boeing twice in my life. 35 years ago, I had just been bumped off a plane going to the Virgin Islands and they said the plane wasn’t full enough and therefore they wouldn’t take me there. And I’d been away from my girlfriend for three weeks. I was 27-years-old and I was absolutely determined to get there. So I hired a plane. I got a blackboard and as a joke I wrote, Virgin Airlines, one-way $39 to the British Virgin Islands and went around all the passengers who got bumped and I sold out my first plane. (laughing) And the next day I rang up Boeing and tried to put on a deep sounding voice and said, do you have any secondhand 747s for sale? And the person said, “Well, what do you do?” I said, well, I run a record company. I’ve got the Rolling Stones, I’ve got the Sex Pistols. And it was a long pause and I thought he was gonna put the phone down on me. And he said, “Look, I’ll tell you what. “I’ll send a salesman along to see you “as long as you make one promise.” And I said, well, what is that? And he said, “That under no circumstances “can you call the airline Virgin.” He said, “Everyone will assume “it’s not gonna go the whole way.” (laughing) Anyway, 35 years ago, we did start with one plane from them and then Virgin Orbit has started with one plane 35 years later. And what I think from working, we’ve had meetings with the U.S. Air Force, with the British Air Force, with the Canadian Air Force, with the European Air Forces, and I think together, if there were one day to maybe have eight different planes or something like that, parked around the world with a number of rockets, a number of satellites. And I think as long as, if that’s done, I think the chances of us getting satellites knocked out by an enemy power is very unlikely because we’d be able to get ours back up far quicker than they’ll be able to get theirs back up.
So one of the things, as I mentioned in the green room, I was one of the two guys who signed the contract for EELV, our big launch program in the Air Force, thinking that commercial lift would pay for a lot of this. And then it disappeared and disappeared some more and never happened. And in part, you’re dependent on commercial launch, I assume. So what is your sense of where are we really with the commercial market for small sats and launch?
I think the world desperately needs big arrays of small satellites to connect the four-and-half billion people who are not connected on the internet, for instance. Because if you’re not connected on the internet, it’s very difficult for you to compete with somebody who is connected on the internet. Whether it’s health or education or numerous other things. Larry Page, I know quite well, who runs Google, who started Google. And I heard a kids ask him, “So what do you do, Mr. Page?” And Larry responded, “I help people find things.” (laughing) And Google has done that extremely well. I’ve lost my track.
Why don’t we go through a question. I see some people standing down there. Why don’t you ask a question?
Thank you, sir. Good morning, Sir Richard. Thank you for the opportunity. My name is Winston Campbell and I’m involved with the space camp in New Mexico, actually. We bring kids out to Spaceport America. We’ve done it for the last six years and really had a blast. And one of the things we’ve talked to the kids about as we go to various sites is, we tell them these are careers you can have. You just gotta work for it, you gotta set your goals, you gotta go after it. As Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit, you expand your operations, you’re gonna need more talent obviously. Engineering, fabrication, but also more pilots. So my question to you is, what are your longterm plans to establish a pipeline and maintain a pipeline of pilots for your operations that we can turn to our kids and say, look this is kind of your path that you need to follow if you wanna kinda get into that business?
Are you pitching? (laughing)
[Winston] I’m doing it for the kids, sir.
Obviously, I don’t think we’ll have any shortage of people who would love to be pilots and astronauts with Virgin Galactic. But we are training a number to be able to cope with the first three spaceships that we’ve got. And hopefully the demand will be such that we will be seeking more and more pilots. And I would hate to let your bosses to think I would be poaching from this room, but you’re the best in the world so I think it’s much more likely that maybe they’ll lend us one or two over the years to come. And hopefully see you in New Mexico some time. It’s a beautiful spaceport and it’s great to see kids getting excited about this.
Let’s go to the other side of the room.
Hi, that’s me. A big fan of yours, Sir Richard Branson. My wife is too but I think it’s for a different reason. So I follow you online and all of your Tweets and your shares on LinkedIn about inclusion and the importance of people. And I wanted to know your vision because the Air Force has realized that people is what runs the service. So what do you do with Virgin to help inclusion and diversify your workforce?
It’s a very important question. And I’ll go right back to when I was seven or eight-years-old, and if I said ill about somebody, my parents would send me to the mirror and make me look into the mirror and just say you’ve got to stand there for 10-minutes how badly it reflects on you. And I think that kind of upbringing taught me to always look for the best in people and if you look for the best in people, you get the best back. And so we’ve looked for leaders at Virgin that are great at praising people, great at looking for the best in people and that’s worked for Virgin. And it’s a slightly overused phrase by companies, to run a company like a family, but that’s what we try to do at Virgin. And from what I’ve heard, the people who are running the U.S. Air Force are much more inclusive in that way, and hopefully that is ricocheting down through the ranks. But I think if you have a happy, well-motivated group of people, really proud of what they’re doing, they can achieve anything and it’s very exciting. Virgin, if we launch a new company, I mean, we’re just going into the cruise business with something called Virgin Voyages, we can draw on all the different parts of Virgin around the world, the best people, and create something unique and special. And I think in the Air Force it’s important that you don’t just get locked into silos. If there’s an exciting new project, that people are pulled from many different parts of the Air Force. I’d love to get your opinion, but I would hate to get you into trouble. (laughing) Thank you.
[Interviewer] Let’s go back to the other side.
Good morning, Sir Richard. My name is Sydney Clutcher and I am a JROTC cadet from Pensacola High School. And I hope to be an astronaut one day. So my question for you is, what qualities are you looking for that are most important to you in your astronauts and pilots?
Yeah, I’m not necessarily the best person to look at the qualities of what’s needed to be an astronaut. I’ve flown balloons around the world, crashed in oceans. (laughing) I think I’ve got the world record for the most times pulled out of the sea by helicopters. So I don’t think the team would trust me in making astronaut choices. But I know that they’ll be looking for people who’ve had an exemplary career in the Air Force. They’ll be, I think, character references is gonna be critical. And one day, if I’m allowed to say, you should apply, go along and meet our team. Anyway, thank you.
[Interviewer] Let’s go back to the other side.
Hello, sir, thank you so much first off for taking questions from the audience in the first place. My name is Jennifer and I’m a reporter and editor with Air Force Magazine. And my question is, by virtue of your experience with Virgin Group, making you somewhat of an artist at the idea of anticipating future challenges and future needs, and spinning off institutions, making them appear, essentially, out of the ether, to meet those head-on, what advice would you give to the military as it approaches the potential creation of a U.S. Space Force?
I think that what you’re doing already, I mean, I was just talking to some of your generals as you do before coming on. You know, I think your sessions where you get people in a room and some pretend to be the enemy, some representing the American Air Force, and you’re just brainstorming, brainstorming, brainstorming, trying to come up with all the potential eventualities that you need to address. And out of those sessions, hopefully, somebody will be writing down a list of things that they can learn from those sessions. The key is, will people at the top act on them? And at Virgin, if I’m on a Virgin Atlantic airplane, I’ll always have a notebook in my pocket, never to be too proud to pull it out and write down feedback from passengers or from staff. So I think a good leader just has to be listening, listening, listening all the time, writing things down and then acting on them. And I think in that way, your company or your Air Force can just get better and better and better. Thank you.
Let me take a couple more. Let’s go back to the other side, if you could.
Sir, my name is Anthony Erbik, and I work for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program. My question is, we do have a number of companies and private industries that are pursuing space projects and we do have funding on the government side. And I’m wondering if you see a balance there that makes the most sense compared to where we are now or even in the past.
So the question is about how much government he ought to fly?
[Anthony] Yes, sir, what is the correct balance between government funding and industry projects? Do you see a balance or is it continually evolving?
So I think private industry can generally, I think, do things more cost effectively than government run businesses. But private industry, you know, there are some things that private industry do that they very much need to work with government on. Yeah, so, with Virgin Orbit putting planes around the world and putting satellites and putting rockets there, it would not make sense for us as a private company, but working with government and maybe the U.S. Air Force, we can both bring our individual skills to it and it makes sense. Yes, I think there’s a good working balance between the two. NASA have effectively become an organization that farms out a lot of its work to private enterprise because they know that private enterprise are likely to do it more cost effectively than they can. But they still keep a watchful eye on it. And some of the really big projects, they still get involved with. By the way, one really exciting thing, who’s seen this wonderful new satellite that looks just like Earth that’s been discovered in the last two weeks? And it’s got water on it, it’s just beautiful. Anybody seen it and have seen pictures of it? One or two people, okay. You should check it out on the internet. It’s like this beautiful Earth. It’s just outside our solar system. And a probe has gone, not that close, but NASA are gonna send another probe to go really close to see if there’s any life on it. But if there’s water, it is quite possible that there is life on it. And these are the sort of things that very small probes can discover in the future.
Let me follow up with, are you seeing other governments interested in Rapid Launch as well? Or is this just a United States issue at this point?
No, the exciting thing thing, I think, is as far as this specific project we’re talking about, the British government got together with the. Sorry, the British Air Force got together with the American Air Force and they’ve also talked to the Canadians and Europeans. So, we are going to be launching a satellite for the U.S. Air Force from Guam in the next few months. And we’re going to be launching a satellite for the U.K. Air Force from Cranwell in England. And that’s the exciting thing, we can launch 3,000 miles apart. We can go into any orbit, anywhere in the world, which is not possible from land based launches. Yeah, it’s so exciting.
I think we have time for one more and I think I’m on this side.
Yes, Van Gogh Marati from Defense in Aerospace Report. Conference off to a tremendous start, Sir Richard. It’s an honor seeing you again. I remember interviewing you many years ago in Farmborough. Can you talk to us a little bit about the nature and your thoughts on how to drive innovation. Few people have started as many things as you have, aside, of course, from having been pulled out of the water several times. It was always in the drive to achieve something that hadn’t been achieved. As the military looks to figure out new and smarter ways of doing things, what do you think are the core elements of how to think about innovation and then execute it?
So most things that Virgin has done has come out of sort of frustration. I told the story about why we started Virgin Atlantic. But that applies to most things we’ve done. Here in America, the train business by and large, disappeared many years ago. The train tracks were covered over by roads. And it’s our belief that we can actually bring really exciting high-speed rail back to America and other places in the world. So we’ve been developing something called Virgin Hyperloop, which are trains that could go up to 1,000 miles an hour in a vacuum, in a tube, floating a magnetic vacuum. And so, what we’ll do, is we believe that’s possible, we’ll invest in one or two engineers. On this case, we built a small track outside Las Vegas. And yeah, we gave it a go. And so I think a lot of these things, you’re just trying things and not being afraid of failure and occasionally falling flat on your face. You need to be working for a company where the people above you do not jump down your throat if you do fail. A company’s got to be able to accept failure as well as accept great things. But if you try 10 ways of fixing something, one of those 10 are quite likely to succeed. I don’t know if we’ve got time. Should we just show the Virgin Hyperloop?
[Interviewer] Yeah, we have that, yeah. (smooth music)
[Man Voiceover] Going up to Devloop for the first time was seeing just unbridled opportunity. We saw the desert completely bare and you saw, in your head, in your mind’s eye, what we are gonna put there. I felt really confident because I have a tremendous confidence in the people that I work with and the people on a team that I helped build.
[Man Voiceover] You’ve got teams from mechanical design, teams from computer engineering, and people who’ve worked on massive motor systems, massive rocket ships, aerospace, aerodynamic engineering.
[Woman Voiceover] This thing that started out as a sketch and an idea and then on this computer is now real and it’s welded and it’s bolted and you can put your hands on it. And then we actually assemble all the parts onto it and set it up to site. And you flip the power switch and it just comes to life. That’s really the engineering dream to get to see that whole process through.
[Woman Voiceover] We broke all Hyperloop speed records. And to think we did all this in 10 months, we proved to the whole world that we can build safely, quickly, efficiently, and prove the technology works. This is just the beginning.
[Richard Voiceover] This company, like others in the Virgin family, has insatiable curiosity and the grit to get it done.
[Woman Voiceover] I can’t wait to see what we do next as a team. (audience applauding)
One of the things that Sir Richard told me is that you actually have to have a lot of fun doing this, that’s half the battle of innovation. And I know that he has a lot of fun on April Fools Day. And I’d like to end with a lighter note. April Fools, tell us about April Fools.
Yeah, April Fools Day, I love pulling people’s legs and then occasionally they pull my leg back. And every April Fool, we come up with something quite fun. But anyway, one year we built a spaceship, and basically it was a UFO, as you do. And we flew the UFO over London and the radio stations got on alert, the army were called out, four police courses were called out. Yeah, that’s the UFO up in the sky early morning about 4:30 in the morning and they had strobe lights and it just look exactly like you’d imagine a UFO would look like. Went down the motorway, every single car stopped, everybody got out of their car. The whole motorway came to a grinding halt. And then we realized we were headed for Gatwick Airport which wasn’t a very good idea. So we managed to land in a foggy field just outside Gatwick. The Army surrounded the field. The police surrounded the field. We were looking out of a little hole in the UFO and we saw this English bobby with a truncheon walking towards us. And I must admit, I smiled thinking this is the first thing that somebody outer space is gonna see, is an English policeman with a truncheon. Anyway, we had this door that just like in E.T. it opened very slowly and we pumped all this dry ice in it. (laughing) And the person that ran our record company in America happened to be about this height. And so we had an E.T. outfit on him, and he walked down the steps very slowly and this policeman just turned and ran. (laughing) Anyway, there he is. So it was fun. Thank you.
Thank you, well, Sir Richard, we puzzled about what do you give a multi-billionaire that he doesn’t already have and we came up with our famous Air Force Association socks. And you’ll find here in the Defense Department at least one major buyer for the Air Force really loves his socks. (laughing) (applauding) I hope they fit. Perfect.
I’ll put the other one on when I get out. Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you. (inspiring music) (applauding)