Virgin Talks Aerospace History

Will Whitehorn started working for the Virgin Group in 1987. Now he is president of operations at Virgin Galactic, the business spin-off that is likely to be behind one of defining moments in aerospace history. Adam Burns caught up with Whitehorn to find out more about how Virgin is pioneering outer space for consumers and pushing conventional limits with its technologies.

Adam Burns: Tell us about your role as president of Virgin Galactic?

Will Whitehorn: I act as the face of the business, the liaison with the Virgin Group, governments and all the rest.

The guy who is nearest to running this business at the moment is my commercial director, Stephen Attenborough. He has the team selling the tickets and working out the commercial strategy for the business. We’ve also got a brilliant project director who came from Virgin’s trains and airline business, Jonathan Firth, who manages the construction of our experimental vehicles and our relationship with New Mexico [where Virgin has its launchpad]. Really, what I’m doing is project management.

It’s been six years to get where we are today and we will be going commercial over the next 36 months or so. Right now, we’re recruiting a CEO [George Whitesides, who recently resigned as NASA’s chief of staff]; after that, I will begin to move into a more non-executive role on this project.

AB: Why do you think you ended up at Virgin Galactic’s helm?

WW: I think I probably got this gig because I was the only one mad enough to want to do it and nobody else thought it would work.

I knew Burt Rutan, the guy who designed our launch system, and I intrinsically understood quite early on what he was doing, and the great safety protocols that are built into the technological approach.

We are taking a lot of the risk out of launching a rocket. Usually it needs the equivalent of a one kiloton nuclear explosion under the shuttle to get it off the ground. We’re using much more modern aviation technologies that we have taken into the space arena. I was really confident we could make this work if we could fund it.

I also believed in the trust people have in the Virgin name. That’s what has led people to put down deposits [Virgin Galactic has deposits totalling $45m so far]. Professor James Lovelock has described this as the important industrial project of the first part of the 21st century – he believes that if we can make space tourism work, it will kick start the industrial revolution of space.

AB: Can we cover how your technology works?

WW: Our launch system isn’t exactly synonymous with the stereotype. Instead of using a rocket to fire a shuttle up to 50,000ft from the ground, we use a carrier aircraft, the White Knight II. It’s one of the most advanced planes in the world, with all of its primary structures constructed from carbon composites.

The space module, SpaceShipTwo, sits in the middle. It’s named VSS Enterprise – a homage to many things, including the US space shuttle and Star Trek.

The White Knight II lifts this whole system to 50,000ft, then drops the spaceship, which falls away and fires itself into space using a rocket motor. Once in space –while the passengers are experiencing weightlessness, seeing Earth from afar and enjoying the silence – the VSS Enterprise changes shape into a shuttlecock so it can safely re-enter the atmosphere. At 68,000 feet it re-forms into a glider, allowing it to land on a runway. Once the VSS Enterprise has landed, the White Knight II is flown in and reattached. A new rocket motor is plugged-in, the nitrous oxide tank is filled up, and it’s good to go again.

This is the first totally reusable space launch system developed in human history. Most of a traditional shuttle has to be thrown away afterwards – it has virtually be rebuilt, which is why NASA cannot launch very frequently. We should be able to launch twice a day from Spaceport America in New Mexico.

The VSS Enterprise is incredibly simple, with not many more than 50 or 60 moving parts. The White Knight II’s got a few more. A shuttle, in comparison, has about 400,000.

It’s using this materials technology that makes this quite exciting; if that same technology was applied to aircraft, they would use 60% less fuel than they do today.

This has been partially applied by Airbus and Boeing – the 787 is partially composite. The new A350 will be a bit more composite. The next Boeing plane will be even more composite. I think they should go the whole way very quickly.

AB: How is this environmental approach helping set the Virgin brand for the 21st century?

WW: The fact that Virgin Atlantic is the only airline that’s actually built an experimental aircraft made entirely of carbon composite – and shown how fuel-efficient it can be – highlights our direction. We’re also building this system to use in space, which could be applied to travelling around the planet in the future, subject to regulatory approval.

This is the absolute cutting edge of the use of carbon composites, and it’s significant that if they were used in all aircraft, those aircraft would use 60% less fuel. And yet manufacturers haven’t built entirely carbon composite vehicles. They’ve said it’s too difficult. Well it isn’t because I can see it. It’s sitting in a factory in Mojave and it’s flying in the air right now.

We utterly rely on air transportation. We couldn’t have a civilisation now without it. We also rely on rail transportation and we rely on shipping. Shipping was the biggest carbon contributor to our transportation output of CO₂. It has now been overtaken by aviation.

You have to say: "Right. If we’re going to be in this business we’ve got to be the best at it, and if we can get good environmental credentials, we’re also going to get good economics because a low environmental output is a lower energy use." It’s a simple equation.

I chair the UK’s peak oil task force, which Virgin has helped to fund. We’ve got some great environmental programmes that Virgin is involved in. It has one of the biggest green investment funds. They’re all good foils to the businesses we’re in today.