Let's talk about one of your big projects at the moment and that is with Virgin Galactic,
you're working towards the next test flight and the eventual real flight, that is
give us an update on where you are.
We are more than tantalizingly close now, so we should be in space within weeks
not months and then we'll be in space with myself in months, not years and then
we'll be in space with people not too long after that so we've got a very exciting
couple of months ahead.
Certainly it is exciting and I wonder what you're expecting in the way of consumer
demand because really at Virgin Group it's all been about disrupting sectors,
throughout your history where customers are under served, but in the field of space
they haven't been served at all, so does that make you nervous at all trying
to engage the market and just what that demand will look like?
If I have a roomful of 10 people, 8 out of 10 would love to go to space if they could
afford it and of those people who could afford it, again it's something like eight
out of ten would love to go to space so I think the market for people who would
love to become astronauts, go to space is gigantic and I think it's up to us to produce
as many spaceships as we can to
to cater with that demand and then we've also obviously got Virgin Orbit which is
going to be putting satellites into space, that should go into space either
December or January and the demand for putting small satellites into space is
a gigantic one, I mean there's nearly four and a half billion people are not
connected, so you know so we're hoping that we'll do well as well.
When you say "if they could afford it", just how much is it today and what will it
look like let's say 10 years from now, will the costs come down significantly?
So it's taken us 14 years to get here, initially the cost will go up, I mean it
was 250 we're trying to work out what price to put it out that will then stay
up I think for three or four years while we vastly recoup our investment and then
it will start going down again and I think, ultimately we could be talking,
in ten years time maybe 40 or 50 thousand dollars to put somebody
into space and that compared with the 50 million dollars it costs
on a Russian spaceship, you know, is anyway more affordable for a vast
majority of people, but obviously not affordable for everybody.
why we see so many billionaires chasing this business pursuit of course you're
not the only one, we think of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos, I understand,
is going neck-and-neck with you to get that first commercial space flight,
who's gonna win?
We'll see, I mean I don't think either of us, you know the safety is obviously
number one priority so neither of us are gonna race to beat the other one,
I think in reality both of us are going to do extremely well out of it, because
the amount of people who want to go to space is enormous and we're not going to
be able to build enough spaceships to satisfy demand so if we both went up
on the same day that would be great.
And when it comes to Elon Musk, he obviously has its hands full today as well,
you would have noticed some of the scrutiny he's come under,
both on the regulatory side and just in the media altogether, I know you've referred
to him as a friend before, you share many professional ambitions as well,
If Elon Musk were to call you up, what advice would you give him?
Yeah I think he's maybe needs to learn the art of delegation, it's important not you know he's got to find
time for himself, he's got to find time for his health and and for his family
and you know he's wonderfully creative person but and yeah but he shouldn't be
getting very little sleep, he should find a fantastic team of people around him
and still jump in on all the major the major issues and you know I think the
reason that I've had such an enjoyable life and a long life there's been finding
wonderful people to run our companies and on the key
issues I can then get involved and so you know if I was to sit down with him,
I have talked to him about it, but I think learning the art of delegation better
would be his one flaw.
Does it say something too about the difficulties of going public, you've
of course have dealt with businesses in the public and private sphere, do you think
entrepreneurs are looking at the same "Oof, I may want to think twice"?
I think again, I think that he, if you've got a public company, if you decide to go public
find a good managing director and a good chairman to run your public
company and be the creative individual that he is, don't, you don't have to
put out Tweets and things about public shareholders you know, leave the public
game to people who enjoy the public game, he obviously doesn't enjoy it,
so you know clear the decks so that you can actually then concentrate on the creative side.
Aside from space, another professional area the two of you share is the Hyperloop
travel, high-speed trains if we can call it that, you have Hyperloop One under the
Virgin brand, you've talked a lot about going in several areas, one country is
India you want to go on, how close are you to getting that project up and running?
Very close, I mean the Indian government had given the go-ahead for Mumbai to
Pune it's the busiest road in India, you know, takes five hours to drive down
it it's a nightmare, lots of accidents, they've said we can build a Hyperloop
right along the side of the road and cut the journey time down to, you know,
just over half an hour and so that will start to be built next year
and it'll be the first sort of flagship Virgin Hyperloop built anywhere in the world.
And then after India what's next?
Once we've got the first, you know, fully running high speed Hyperloop in place,
the demand is, I mean the demand is going to be gigantic, so Dubai, that we're talking
to them about connecting the new airport with the old airport,
Saudi Arabia we're in discussions about Hyperloop going through the desert, but
you know, but I think it's a business I think there which has got a fantastic future.
Do you know yet what a ticket will cost to get on board?
It'll be no more than a high-speed train line ticket and you know, potentially
we're be able to bring the price down further than that.
Since we're talking transportation I do want to talk to you too about this idea
of the return of supersonic travel, is that something we're gonna see anytime soon?
Yes, I mean I think Virgin Galactic is the only space company that is actually
building spaceships shaped as airplanes and once we've got those in Galactic,
you know, fully bedded down, we want to move on to dealing with
high-speed travel and maybe working with Boom or working in competition with Boom,
but I think you will see a high-speed travel back again.
How quickly can I get from here in Singapore to the East Coast in the U.S., because my mom and dad
might have interest in that.
Well it depends I mean obviously what would be wonderful is if we could actually
put you into space and then bring you back down again, the only problem is
I'm not sure that everybody's body will be equipped for that and you'll have to go through
you'll be traveling at 70 and a half thousand miles an hour, so
your journey time would only be half an hour, but the g-force is coming back, some
passengers may not know, so I suspect we'll go sub-orbital just below space,
which would still halve the journey time, maybe slightly more than halve
the journey time.
Being in the business of transporting amongst so many other things, climate
change is a big concern to you at the moment. There was quite a damaging
report coming out from the IPCC this week, how concerned are you about
the current effort to tackle climate change?
The IPCC report was one of the most damning reports I've ever read.
Terrifying, I mean they were talking about, you know, massive flooding,
I mean increased hurricanes, losing every single reef in the world and much quicker
than they'd estimated before, so my feeling is that we need to take this
as seriously as the world did when Hitler started the Second World War,
we need to get all the countries together, we need to create a Marshall Plan
for the world and and we need to jump on it and I believe the private sector
and government can work together on working out a Marshall Plan to solve
this problem, we will solve it. Last week we announced at the Virgin
Atlantic that we were flying one of our planes on fuel, that this was going
up the chimney of aluminium plants and steel plants into the atmosphere and we
were actually taking that chimney waste and turning it into jet aviation
with a company called LanzaTech, now if every single steel mill and aluminium
mill were converted, 50 percent of all planes in the world
would run on recycled fuel and so governments and the private sector need
to sit down and let's work out how it can be done and let's solve the problem
and make sure the world doesn't face a disaster.
When you draw comparisons to the Marshall Plan, I wonder to what extent we need U.S. leadership,
you have lamented president Trump's own decision on the Paris deal, have you
thought about appealing to him directly? I know you've exchanged letters in the past,
what would your message be to president?
Look I think that he's just got to start believing in science and when you've
got a thousand scientists being so clear-cut, you can't ignore them, I mean it, you know,
even if it's just as an insurance policy, I mean you just can't ignore them.
And so I don't think president Trump would listen to me,
but I would just... somebody should appeal to him, fortunately in America,
most of the major states realized we have a big problem,
California obviously leading the way and showing how it can be done and if, you know,
if we're not going to get leadership from the White House, we've got to get leadership from the States.
But the rest of the world must not wait, I mean, climate doesn't respect
borders and the rest of the world is going to have to rally together,
to get on top of the problem.