Sir Richard has been successful in drumming up support for Virgin Galactic, not least from the people of New Mexico. They even voted for a tax rise to fund the $225m (£141m) “Spaceport America” in the Mojave Desert that Virgin Galactic uses as its operational base. In 2005, Sir Richard said the company hoped to begin space flights by 2008. Thousands of jobs were to be created in one of America’s poorest states.
The optimism was based on the success of its partner company, Scaled Composites, which won the $10m Ansari X prize for sending a privately owned manned vessel into space in 2004. It may have seemed simple to build a bigger version of Scaled’s SpaceShip-One to take passengers.
Disaster struck in July 2007 when three people were killed in an explosion during an equipment test on the ground. Scaled was fined more than $25,000 for “serious” health and safety violations.
Despite this setback, Virgin Galactic secured $280m from the Abu Dhabi state investment firm Aabar in 2009. In October 2010, SpaceShipTwo made its first manned flight. Getting the spaceship to piggyback on a plane for the first part of the flight was supposed to make the rocket-ignition process safer. On its website, Virgin Galactic says: “Effectively detonating a huge bomb at ground level means everything has to go right first time – if it doesn’t there are generally few options for those inside.”