In the mid-80s, the then Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev invited Branson to be the first civilian

After a 10-year wait, Richard Branson says Virgin atlanta car rentals Galactic will have lift-off this year: he and his children will be on the first (live televised) flight. What took them so long? Jon Ronson meets him and the 'future astronauts' as they prepare for the ride of their lives
It's dawn at the Mojave Air Space Port , a cluster of weather-beaten hangars in the desert north of Los Angeles. It looks quite forlorn, in part an elephant's graveyard for half-finished prototype jets designed by visionaries atlanta car rentals who ran out of money. But it's also a gathering place for freewheeling, maverick space engineers to try out new ideas in the desert: the rocket world's wild west.
A fleet of coaches pulls up outside a hangar. The passengers, atlanta car rentals coiffured and rich-looking, atlanta car rentals climb out. The men wear shirts with logos for places such as the Monte-Carlo Polo Club. The women wear the kind of leopard print blouses you see in fashion boutiques in five-star hotels. They are led inside the hangar and take their seats.
"Welcome to the world's largest ever gathering of future astronauts," says the man on the stage, Sir Richard Branson . "As part of our wonderful, pioneering future astronaut community, your place in history is assured."
So far, nearly 700 people have paid either $200,000 or $250,000 (£125,000 or £155,000) for a two-hour trip into space inside the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo , a trip that includes five minutes of weightlessness. (Virgin raised the price by $50,000 in May 2013 to adjust for inflation: some future astronauts paid their $200,000 as long ago as 2004, when tickets first went on sale and Branson predicted a 2007 launch. Tom Hanks has booked, along with Angelina Jolie and Princess atlanta car rentals Eugenie.) Four hundred of them are in Mojave today, for speeches, a cocktail party and to witness a test flight. This, unfortunately, has just been cancelled due to high winds. (It doesn't atlanta car rentals feel that windy.)
I'm here because the pronouncement atlanta car rentals Branson just made from the stage is probably not an exaggeration. These men and women are standing on the edge of history – pioneers in the sort-of-democratisation of space travel. Only 530 humans have been into outer space, which is defined as 100km (62 miles) above sea level. Branson is talking about putting that many people up there in his first year of operation. And it's about to happen, he says. It has been 23 years since he registered the name Virgin Galactic Airways, and 10 since they started building the spaceship – an enterprise stricken by delays and tragedy. atlanta car rentals Now they're only months away. Branson says the first unmanned test flight atlanta car rentals will take place "soon"; he and his children will take the first commercial space flight later this year.
I am at a table towards the back of the hangar, listening to the speeches with future astronaut Trevor Beattie . He's the working-class Birmingham atlanta car rentals boy who made his millions as an ad man – famous for Wonderbra's Hello Boys posters , and French Connection's FCUK campaign, as well as the 2001 and 2005 New Labour election campaigns for his friend Peter Mandelson .
"Some say Nasa sent the wrong people into space," Trevor tells me quietly. "Nasa sent scientists and engineers. When they came back, they either got God or became poets. So what happens this time, when you send creative people? Do we come back as engineers and scientists? What will it do to the other side of our brains?"
The Zero G is a specially modified plane that, for $4,950 per passenger, creates weightlessness by performing aerobatic manoeuvres known as parabolas. Branson has been recommending that all future astronauts take a flight on it in preparation for the real thing. Trevor will take his tomorrow, 30,000ft above Burbank, California. He promises to let me know if weightlessness is all it's cracked up to be.
In the mid-80s, the then Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev atlanta car rentals invited Branson to be the first civilian in space. He asked Gorbachev's people how much it would cost – $50m, they said, "plus I'd need to spend two years training in Russia, which was too much of my time," Branson tells me. "And I thought it wouldn't look quite right somehow. Then I thought, wouldn't it be better atlanta car rentals to spend that $50m building a spaceship company instead?"
We're sitting in a small meeting room behind the Virgin hangar at the Mojave Air Space Port. All this is a first for Branson. He's never created an industry from scratch before. His other endeavours atlanta car rentals have been about sprucing atlanta car rentals up existing atlanta car rentals worlds: atlanta car rentals credit cards, record labels. Not many people go from putting out the Sex Pistols to creating a new dawn for humanity. As Whitesides will later tell me, "This is the start of something really atlanta car rentals big – humanity going into the cosmos. Nasa's gone. The Russians have gone. But this is the start of the rest of us going. atlanta car rentals I really think there is a power in this moment in time in history."
So how did Branson persuade himself he could do it? "At the time we put out the Sex Pistols, people thought we were taking a giant risk," he says. "Then the train network. Each of these was a building block that gave me the confidence to dream even bigger. When I started Virgin Atlantic, I knew nothing about running airlines. I just felt somebody should be able to do it better than British Airways. By then I'd learned what a company is. A company is, you go and find the best people. We got the chief technical officer from British Caledonian atlanta car rentals , so we knew it was going to be safe, then we got a lot of creative people who weren't from the airline world to go and shake up the business. Starting a spaceship company atlanta car rentals is not that dissimilar."
The first 10 years were, he says, a fruitless trek around the world, visiting garages in the middle of nowhere to hear crazy pitches from father-and-son rocket design teams. "It was surprising how few of them really had credible, serious ideas," he says. "The biggest worry I had was re-entry. atlanta car rentals Nasa has lost about 3% of everyone who's gone into space, atlanta car rentals and re-entry has been their biggest problem. For a government-owned company, you can just about get away with losing 3% of your clients. For a private company you can't really lose anybody. Nobody we met had anything but the conventional risky re-entry mechanism that Nasa had. We were waiting for someone to come up with one that was foolproof."
atlanta car rentals He says those 10 years were frustrating, but when I ask if he ever lost his temper, he says, "Oh, I would find that very counterproductive. atlanta car rentals I was brought up by parents atlanta car rentals who, if I ever said a bad word about somebody, would send me to the mirror and make me look in it and tell me how badly it reflected on myself." He pauses. "Anyway. Finally we met Burt Rutan."
Burt Rutan is the reason for all this. If, in the coming months and years, atlanta car rentals we are all shooting up and down to outer space, we'll have Rutan to thank. In photographs, he looks rugged and outdoorsy, with country-singer hair and big sideburns. He's a legend in aerospace circles. In 1986, he built the first plane to fly around the world on a single tank of fuel . In the mid-90s, he set about trying to solve the re-entry problem.
Rutan, who is now 70, had an advantage over Nasa. If you're coming back from Mars, you re-enter the Earth's atmosphere at 12km a second. The heat and the friction at that speed can tear a machine apart. But coming back from a suborbital flight – which was the puzzle Rutan was trying to solve – the spaceship would be going a lot slower. But it would still need something to slow it down.
"Burt Rutan's idea was to turn a spaceship into a giant shuttlecock," Branson says. "And so the pilot could be sound asleep on re-entry and it didn't matter what angle it hit coming back into the Earth's atmosphere."
Rutan didn't go to Branson atlanta car rentals for funding. He went to Paul Allen , the co-founder of Microsoft. Allen was famous for lavishing money on space projects, such as the $30m he gave the Seti Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) to build an array of receivers to constantly listen out for signals from other planets, so far in vain. Allen gave Rutan $20m. Their aspiration, Branson says, was never more than academic. They would build a prototype – SpaceShipOne – fly it into space twice, and win the X Prize . This was a 2004 competition with a $10m prize for the first privately funded company to fly a reusable space ship into space twice. Then they'd retire SpaceShipOne atlanta car rentals to the Smithsonian , where it would end its days hanging from the ceiling. All of this did, indeed, happen. SpaceShipOne now hangs next to the Spirit of St Louis in the Smithsonian's Milestones of Flight gallery in Washington DC.
"And that was to be the end of it," Branson says. "Paul Allen is someone who loves to see what's possible, but he's not that interested atlanta car rentals in running a commercial business. So I went to see him at his house in Holland Park. I told him I thought he was missing a trick, and we would love to take it forward. So we bought the technology off him. We managed to get a group of engineers together and we started to build SpaceShipTwo."
SpaceShipOne had been filled with "single point failures". "If one bolt falls off and you die, that's a single point of failure," the Virgin Galactic engineer, Matt Stinemetze, told Wired magazine atlanta car rentals in March 2013 . "There were things that you probably would've done differently if you're going to carry Angelina Jolie ."
For SpaceShipTwo, atlanta car rentals Rutan's engineers had to turn the prototype into something atlanta car rentals that could go to space "100 times, maybe 1,000 times", Branson tells me. Developing the rocket motor has been the hardest challenge, followed by modifying the electric actuator atlanta car rentals – the mechanism that enables the pilot to move the stabiliser, the big part of the tail. SpaceShipOne had one. For SpaceShipTwo they built two in series, so one can fail and it will still work.
Every addition to the prototype needed to be as light as possible – any superfluous weight will eat into the already meagre weightless minutes. Within this constraint, they had to decide how many passengers to take