Spaceman

Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, talks space travel, dirty tricks and Abu Dhabi.

We’ve all been there. One night, you get talking, have a few drinks and come up with an idea that will change the world, or at least you think will change the world. When you wake up the next morning, it’s usually forgotten about. That is unless you happen to be Sir Richard Branson, Will Whitehorn and Buzz Aldrin discussing space travel.

“The idea for Virgin Galactic was probably born in a bar in Marrakech,” Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic tells CEO Middle East. “We had just built a capsule for Richard to fly around the world in and we were delayed in taking off by bad weather. Richard asked Buzz a very simple question about why rockets were never launched from rockets and Buzz replied: ‘we did do that and it was a good idea but in the rush for Apollo to get completed and get to the moon a lot of ideas were abandoned. But the big rocket, it worked and it was a good idea.’”

Whitehorn registered the brand rights for the idea the following day, not realising at the time that Branson had already registered Virgin as a trademark for space travel 10 years earlier.

Some 14 years since that infamous bar room conversation, Whitehorn and Branson are on the verge of the most dramatic leap in commercial space travel ever seen. Three hundred people — from Michael Schumacher to designer Philippe Starck and physicist Stephen Hawking — have each coughed up $200,000 and are patiently waiting to board the first Virgin Galactic space flight, due to take off at the end of 2011. The company, following a $280m investment from Abu Dhabi’s Aabar Investments, is worth a staggering $900m. First panned by the critics as a dream too far, Virgin Galactic is now a mega-brand and company that is on course to become incredibly profitable.

From dream to reality

The turning point from dream to reality came when Whitehorn met Burt Rutan, the designer behind GlobalFlyer, the aircraft that adventurer Steve Fossett used for his round-the-world solo flight in 2005, and the SpaceShipOne, a reusable aircraft that could take a pilot at least 100km into space. Whitehorn knew immediately that he would be the man to help get Virgin Galactic off the ground and into space. “I intrinsically got what Burt was telling me. He cracked one of the biggest problems of space, which is re-entry.”

Virgin has spent more than $100m developing SpaceShipTwo, which will be launched 50,000ft into space using Virgin’s carrier plane, WhiteKnightTwo. Despite the vast sums of money required for such a huge project, Whitehorn has never doubted Virgin’s capability of creating the world’s first commercial space travel company.

“I was one of those nine-year-old kids who was told by his mother in 1969, while watching the moon landing, that one day I would go to the moon. My parent’s generation had seen so much change and had seen it happen so fast that they imagined Stanley Kubrick’s vision of 2001 was going to happen.”

But it wasn’t just his mother’s intuition that persuaded Whitehorn to put his name on such a project. It was also his faith in the founder of Virgin, Sir Richard Branson. Since joining Virgin in 1987 to work in the newly listed company’s investor public relations department, Whitehorn has seen the group through some incredibly challenging times, including the British Airways dirty tricks affair, which began in 1993 and ended up in court some years later.

“There was a deep recession in the early ‘90s and Richard was determined that the airline was going to succeed [but] there were certain people at BA who were equally determined that it wasn’t,” he recalls. “That period was extremely challenging; having to track down the activities that BA were up to like slurring Virgin in the press and saying Virgin was bust when it wasn’t. At the time Virgin was a much younger company and people were much more nervous.”

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