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entirely certain as to how far away that horizon is.” Paying passengers are merely a stepping stone towards the company’s ultimate goal of industrial spaceflight, with reusable craft. “Our quest is to reduce the cost of space launch, so reusable vehicles are the holy grail,” Attenborough says, suggesting that, in the future, Virgin Galactic may sell its transport services to asteroid mining companies, scientists, or companies and governments wishing to place astronauts or satellites in space. For example, it’s currently collaborating with communications company OneWeb, which aims, via a satellite network, to offer internet broadband to everyone on the planet.
CROSSING CONTINENTS Virgin Galactic also has its sights set on operating long-haul air travel above the Earth’s atmosphere, where lower gravity and lack of air resistance would save huge amounts of time and fuel. Flight times of a couple of hours from London to Sydney have even been mooted. “With the exception of Concorde, we’ve
been travelling through the air at a little below the speed of sound for many, many
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years,” Attenborough adds. “This would leapfrog supersonic speeds and probably get into hypersonic, in excess of Mach 5.” One of Virgin Galactic’s rivals in
commercial spaceflight is Washington State-based Blue Origin, which has already secured contracts to deliver satellites into space, and successfully launched New Shepard, a reuseable launch system. Te company’s boss is Jeff Bezos, the man who earned his fortune through Amazon. He hopes space tourism will give his rocket scientists the practice they need to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of space travel, with the ultimate goal of moving heavy industry off planet Earth altogether. “It is a step towards a spacefaring
civilisation,” he said in a recent BBC documentary, The 21st Century Race for Space. “We have sent robotic probes to every planet in the solar system and we know, without a shadow of a doubt, that Earth is the best one. This is the best planet! The only way to really protect it is to eventually move heavy industry off Earth.” Bezos understands why critics of space
exploration want to see our home planet’s myriad problems solved before we head into
space. However, he contends that space is “part of the solution” to Earth’s problems. “Space is a much better place to do heavy
manufacturing. In space, you have 24/7 solar power. Every kind of element that you need is available in very large quantities. Over the next couple of hundred years, that will allow us to both continue to have a dynamic, expanding, growing, thriving, interesting civilisation, while protecting the diamond of a planet that we evolved on.”
FOREIGN BODIES Within space industry, asteroid mining is an intriguing possibility. In 2014 the European Space Agency landed (and inadvertently bounced) a probe on the surface of a comet called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This was just the start. While comets tend to be dust and ice, asteroids are composed mainly of metals and rock, many of which are invaluable to the products and industry essential to modern life and that could be depleted from Earth within the next 50 to 60 years. Over the following few decades it’s thought spaceflight companies will send robotic probes to asteroids in order to extract valuable minerals and metals. A
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