The following text is my expanded notes from my 24 January interview in New York with Virgin Galactic commercial director Stephen Attenborough. Some of this found its way into my article about the business side of the Virgin Galactic plan.
credit: Virgin Galactic
We have had our first confirmed charter flight. An American booked an entire flight. We could see group bookings from people with an agenda, for art, science, for spiritual reasons. Scientific research etc could see a third White Knight II (WK2) needed [Galactic has ordered two].
We gained 25 new customers in the last month (December 2007 - January 2008). A strong December and January. Two to three in the last couple of days.
For training we want activities for strangers [the individual passengers who may not know each other] to get to know each other, team building activities.
Its still three days of training and preparation, we are still designing the three day training [regime]. The [ongoing] centrifuge work [with the founders] will inform that package of activities to take on before you go.
We are working with travel agents, selling it as the adventure end of luxury holidays, advertised as ultimate experience.
Our customers are inspired by NASA Apollo programme, the age range is in the 40s to 50s, our agents are contributing to growth in ticket sales.
Last year [2007] saw work being done behind closed doors, but we wanted to show what was going on. Now is the year of tangibility, something we can show.
WK2 will roll out of the factory in May, in about 14 weeks [from 24 January].
Roll out to start ground testing then first flight during the summer. Although WK2 will be test flying, Oshkosh debut in July is perhaps a little early.
The customers pay their own way to go to events like the New York unveil event. The founders going to the [NASTAR] centrifuge was different, "it was out of our pocket".
The tickets sales are proof of the market, our customers help to convince financial markets that there is demand.
Our website gets lots of registrations. We also get customers from referrals, word of mouth, its acting like viral marketing at the moment.
Current customers want special access, insiders on the project, factory visits, and they are getting those.
We are earning interest on deposits and ticket sales. The deposits and ticket sales are in an escrow account. That is not our money yet but we have the right to use it. It is appropriate to ring fence it. We have had some refund requests, six in all [as of 24 January], two due to health issues and the other four "due to changing circumstances".
We have a ball park figure [for cost of training element] but don’t want to talk about that. It will entail three days at a hotel, centrifuge is a big component. Our package will start in New Mexico. The centrifuge could be additional.
For acclimatisation training we may want our own centrifuge installation for Virgin Galactic at the New Mexico spaceport, maybe.
We could do cut price, everything but the flight. There will be a mock up flight deck in the left fuselage [from a plan view] of WK2. We could offer simulator training to experience flying the WK2/SS2. We probably haven’t thought of all the applications.
We need to amortise the investment as quickly as possible. Our business plan is focused on demand and the market we know about.
The decision to go ahead was made with the Virgin Group investment advisory committee. It advises Richard [Branson] on potential investments and authorises them. It goes through a process. A couple of investment advisory committee members are on the board of Virgin Galactic.
So many commercial directors, investment advisory committees, boards of directors, CPA's, CTO's, CEO's to launch a silly rocket. This guy must be British.
4 years since they flew anything into space. They might be getting rusty. No news on whether they ever got the engine to start since the explosion.
Brilliant analysis! [/snark]
It's not about "launch[ing] a silly rocket"; it's about building a business. More than that, even, it's about developing a one-off experimental prototype into a production vehicle, and building a new business around this entirely new product.
Your comment doesn't reveal anything about your background, but I have some experience both in hobby rocketry and aerospace systems development. I know how easy the former seems, and how complex the latter truly is. Don't compare the WK2/SS2 effort to your favorite amateur/experimental rocketry effort, or even to the original Rutan/Allen X-Prize effort; instead, compare it to other efforts to develop and field new vehicles to transport the paying public.
On that score, they're doing very well indeed.
I've never been a fan of some of Rutan's bloviating, but there's no doubt he knows what he's doing when it comes to designing and building flying things. Similarly, Branson can sometimes be a self-important blowhard, but the evidence is pretty clear that he knows how to build businesses. Folks drumming their fingers on the table and muttering "where's the spaceship" would do well to keep their track records in mind.
The propulsion work was supposed to have been suspended while the investigation into the 26 July 2007 nitrous oxide explosion.
The best explanation I have heard about that is that they used to do the cold flow N2O tests in the Scaled hangar and for some reason they did the test that resulted in the explosion out in the desert without cover.
While N2O is deemed stable if it gets hot it can decompose and become explosive in some situations. I think that will be found to be the mistake in the end.
They may be conducting small scale work on the propulsion system, I don't know, but at the moment it is definitely the pacing item in Virgin Galactic's development work.