Main Engine Cut Off - T+194: Branson & Bezos Fly To Space

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Richard Branson flew to space aboard SpaceShipTwo on Virgin Galactic’s Unity 22, and Jeff Bezos flew to space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard 16. I share my thoughts on the flights, the vehicles, and how I’m currently looking at suborbital tourism and why it does or doesn’t matter.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 42 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, and seven anonymous—and 628 other supporters.TopicsVirgin Galactic's First Fully Crewed Spaceflight #Unity22 - YouTubeVirgin Galactic on Twitter: “Take-off! The #Unity22 crew including @RichardBranson leave Spaceport America, New Mexico for #VirginGalactic’s first fully-crewed spaceflight.”T+163: Suborbital Crew, Virgin Galactic to ISS - Main Engine Cut OffT+105: Jonathan McDowell - Main Engine Cut OffVirgin Galactic flight test director Mark Stucky leaves companyNew Shepard First Human Flight - YouTubeFirst Human Flight Post-Flight Press Conference - YouTubeSlopes Ski & Snowboard - Track Your Winter AdventuresThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by NASA

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and I want to talk about the two long-awaited flights of Spaceship Two flying Richard Branson and New Shepard flying Jeff Bezos, both of them flying with several other crew members. We've been waiting for these for years. It's been something we've been looking forward to for a while. We are now beyond them. So I want to talk a little bit about some thoughts on the flights themselves, and then also get into some larger thoughts about the state of suborbital tourism, the way that I'm looking at it now, kind of update my thoughts because it's been probably a few years since I've, you know, taken a deep dive on it on the show. So, and I think the last year or so, my thinking's changed on the way that I look at these

two vehicles, specifically the industry itself and where it's all going. So in chronological order, Virgin Galactic's Unity 22 flight was first. This was carrying four passengers and two pilots. That's where I want to start with things that I noticed about the flight. Virgin Galactic's Unity 22 flight was first. This was carrying four passengers and two pilots. That's where I want to start with things that I noticed about the flight. Virgin Galactic kept referring to this as a fully crewed space flight. They've got a tweet saying that the day of the launch, and they kept using that verbiage throughout the stream and the press conferences around it and answers to the press and all that. So I'm really curious if that's the case,

that this can only carry six people total, because up until now, the plan or the renderings have been six passengers and two pilots for a total of eight. They're saying this is fully crewed. Maybe the maximum they can fit in there is four at any one time. If you look at the video and compare it to the renderings they put out a couple of months ago when they said, here's what our cabin's going to look like, the seats kind of can be swapped out for these little payload racks in, you know, whatever, I guess, whatever combination makes sense for who's flying, what they're flying. So in the renderings, there was either six seats in the back or there was three seats down one side of the spacecraft and three payload racks, you know, across the aisle from them.

So maybe they can only fit four people total, but they can do any mix of payloads and people. So in this case, this was an all-passenger flight, just four seats. Maybe they can do one where there's, you know, two passengers that don't have payloads and two passengers that do have payload racks. you know, two passengers that don't have payloads and two passengers that do have payload racks. Whatever the case is, it sort of seems like this is the amount of people that they can take up to, you know, the altitude that they're trying to aim for, which is above 80 kilometers. I guess we'll see as the next couple of flights happen and they start introducing professional astronauts. There's a flight coming up for the Italian Air Force. producing, uh, professional astronauts. There's a flight coming up for the Italian Air Force.

The, uh, potential is there for NASA to fly crew on that suborbital crew program that they announced a year or two back or whatever that was. So I think as we start to see some, you know, less test flights and more flights with people paying to go up and people going up with payloads themselves that aren't something they can carry, can carry in their flight suit, maybe we'll get more clear of an answer here. But for now, it seems like this is going to be limited at six people total, which I think does impact not only the planning for how much money they can make from each flight, but the planning for what they're actually going to be able to do on board. Now, of course, one of the benefits of only flying with four people in the passenger cabin is that the cabin looked very spacious when they were up there in zero G. There was basically two empty seat spots in the back that was, you know, you could see members of the crew going back there, floating around, looking out those windows as well.

So it definitely had a very spacious vibe to it. The layout, you know, provides this full aisle basically, uh, where people were kind of floating around in there. So I did, I did appreciate that from, uh, the videos that we've seen inside that just looked very spacious, being able to like pull over to whatever different windows you want. Uh, that was definitely noticed. Now this obviously came with a lot of pomp and circumstance out at Spaceport America. It's a big day for them, given how much flack that has received locally there. The spaceport itself has been kind of a local politics issue for a while. And rightly so. I think there's a lot of people mad about how much money the state has spent on that spaceport,

when it is really only used by Virgin Galactic right now. So locally there's probably some more storylines there that I should find somebody from New Mexico to talk about this kind of stuff. But they had a huge setup there, big press attention, a lot of VIPs. There was, you know, a whole, it was a Virgin event. So there was musical acts and there was speeches

and all this kind of stuff. I am bypassing the entire debate about where space begins because it's very boring to me and I am a strict Jonathan McDowell line observer. So 80 kilometers is my line. I don't really care about that. As I said back when they did start flying above 80 kilometers with Virgin Galactic's Spaceship Two, if you look out the window, kind of hard to argue that you're in space. It's an amazing view from up there. So I'm bypassing all of that. I'm bypassing all of the culture war stuff about billionaires and what they're spending their money on, though I think I'll probably circle back to that in the second half of the episode. A very, uh, there's been a lot of drama with Virgin Galactic over the past several years. Um, you know, going all the way back to, uh, the, the accident that killed somebody on one of the flight, one of the flights, you know, that was not that long ago.

Um, that was 2014. So all in all, it was not that long ago, uh, that that happened and Mike Alsberry was killed. They've flown a bunch since then, but there's been a series of articles that have come out about issues they've had with those flights that they didn't disclose. There was a big gap after they first flew Beth Moses in the passenger cabin between that and the next spaceflight. So a very storied history. And I think that was even further complicated by Richard Branson wanting to fly before Jeff Bezos. So, you know, up until this last month or so, we thought that they were going to be flying Richard Branson towards the end of the year. Once Jeff Bezos announced he was going for July 20th, all of a sudden the date moved up quite a bit.

They shuffled around their program. I'm curious about that. There seems like there's going to be a little more fallout. Uh, Mark Stuckey, the head of flight tests at Virgin Galactic, uh, just left Virgin Galactic, apparently not under his own accord, or he said not on his own timeline. So it seems like there's going to be some additional fallout for that. Uh, and I just want to know what the next couple of flights are going to be like from Virgin Galactic. I'm still hedging my bets here about them getting into an operational cadence after

this flight. But I guess that's stuff to see in the future. But all in all, great day for Virgin Galactic. I'm not the biggest fan of Virgin Galactic overall, but I do think this was exactly the kind of day that the company needed. So congrats to everyone out there. If you're listening and you work there, great day for you. A great couple of weeks for you, really. And you deserve every bit of that fun. Now, a couple of days later, Blue Origin went up with

New Shepard 16, flying Jeff Bezos and friends. It was his brother, Mark, Wally Funk, aerospace icon, and they're calling him the first paying passenger, though there's like an asterisk or whatever next to that, Oliver Damon. So again, here's another four-passenger crew. This one, though, is definitely not a full crew. They still have six seats in the cabin. They're going to fill six seats, I presume, on the next flight. For whatever reason, you know, maybe Jeff just wanted some extra space up there, so he said, let's just fly four. I think with their first crewed flight it makes sense to keep things a little more limited to just kind of work things out before you've got every single seat and inch

filled in that cabin get all your procedures down kind of limit the amount of variables is kind of the way I took it but anyway now it's a bummer live that we didn't have video from inside the cabin of this launch, that we did have audio the whole way, which was a lot of fun. Wally Funk was hooting and hollering all the way up, which was, you know, one of probably the best moments of space this year. The video that we did see afterwards makes the cabin look very tight. that we did see afterwards makes the cabin look very tight. Got the abort motor taking up a lot of space in the middle, and it limits the vertical space available in the cabin. And I don't know if it was the angles, if it was the fact that, you know, you're sitting in a round capsule. Whatever it is, it looks less spacious than Spaceship Two. Now, is that a problem? Here's my personal take on this.

If I'm flying on one of these very quick flights, that's the other thing about these live streams, it really put a fine point on how short these flights are. And I think to the wider audience that is usually not watching space stuff, I personally received a lot of questions from friends and family in my life that aren't interested in space about like, why was that so quick? That was kind of pointless seeming. So I think the stream, the fact that this is minutes end to end was definitely accentuated for people that aren't necessarily paying attention to this every single day. But if I'm on one of these flights that is 7 to 11 minutes, and I'm going up to this altitude, I'm going to be spending most of my time, if not all of my time, looking out the window. The zero-g part of it is something that I will either buy a parabolic flight before or after

my launch here to get a little time floating around in zero-g as part of my whole experience. If I'm going to orbit, I'm going to be spending a lot of time like that. But if I'm one of these short ones, I'm going for the views. So if I'm trading off between the more spacious looking yet smaller windows of spaceship two, or the less spacious looking cabin, but better, bigger windows on New Shepard, I'm coming down on the New Shepard side of that. You know, I'm going to be glued to that window on the way up and down. Uh, and so for, I think that's a little bit of the trade-off again. I think I'm not a hundred percent convinced that the cabin is as tight in New Shepard as it looked on the live streams, though it certainly appears

that way to me. And I'd be very curious to see what it looks like when six people are on board. way to me and I'd be very curious to see what it looks like when six people are on board. But again, maybe it was the angles of the camera or, you know, if one of them was holding a camera and floating around the cabin might feel a little different. But that's just kind of my initial impression there. Blue Origin was really pouring on the emphasis that New Shepard is just part of their journey. It is feeding into the other stuff that they're working on. They make it seem much more connected to their long-term view of developing space. Virgin Galactic did not spend a lot of time

talking about that kind of stuff. And I think that roughly maps with the way that we should look at these vehicles. I always considered Spaceship Two an architectural dead end if you're looking at what that thing can do and what it might do in the future. New Shepard obviously is limited, but does have a lot of commonalities with things that Blue Origin would like to work on in the future, and for that reason feels like less of a dead end than something like Spaceship Two. All in all, it was really

interesting to see these two so close together, getting their different types of pomp and circumstance, seeing what the wider media reaction is. That's something that, you know, there's a lot of culture war over all different parts of this. But just seeing the way that national media covers it, seeing the way that, you know, my non-space interested friends and family are interacting with this kind of news or what they make of it. That stuff is really useful to me to just kind of watch and see how it's received. So that's something that I think these, the presence of Branson and Bezos on these amped that up when it's the next one and it's a couple of randos, or maybe it's someone that you do know from an industry you like or something like that.'m curious to know how this maintains it certainly seems like richard branson is going to attract more of the celebrity crowd i don't know what blue origin is going to attract in the way of celebrities and things like that um but we'll see what the attention level is

when it comes around you know let's check back in a year or two from now after they've done another couple of flights and gotten it out and we start to see some interesting names on these lists, we'll see what the attention's like by then. I think it would drop off pretty quick, but who knows, maybe it'll be bigger on the non-national media, bigger on TikTok and Instagram, things like that. I guess we'll see how that plays out. Now, I want to dive into the actual takeaways that I had from thinking about suborbital tourism a lot, the way that I'm looking at this market, things that I think would be interesting to track for the future. But before I do that,

I need to say thank you to all of you out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff every single month. There are 670 of you supporting the show. I'm so thankful for your support and the support of the 42 executive producers of this episode. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everday Astronaut, Frank, Julian, and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Haymanth, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much

for making this episode possible. If you want to help join that crew, support the show, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Don't forget to check out Headlines if you are at $3 a month or more.

You get an entire other podcast in your feed every single week. You notice this show is kind of drifting to like every 10 days. and that's just based on what's going on that I have something to say about. But Headlines happens every single weekend. I read through all the stories of the week, let you know what's important, what I think about them. It's a great way to stay up with me, stay up with Space News, and support the show. So head over there and check that out if you're interested. So I was working with a

friend the other day, my friend Curtis, he makes an amazing app called Slopes. You should definitely check it out if you ski or snowboard. It's an incredible app on the App Store. But we were working the other day together between the Branson flight and the Bezos flight. And I was just talking with him about the reaction to these flights and about why these flights set off the culture war and bad comedy and all of the kind of Internet drama that we watched play out for 10 or 12 days there. I'm just trying to make sense of it to understand where that specifically is coming from. And he had an interesting comment to me that he was like, well, that's because this is weird. This is new and weird and not normalized. We've all accepted super yachts or cruise ships or hotel chains or whatever the things are that million and billionaires spend their money on. And nobody

really fights about super yachts anymore. There's obviously people that get fired up about that, but it's not something like that lights off the internet in the way that these did. And it's just because we've accepted that those are the way that things are. So this is new and it's interesting and it's weird and it's an easy target. And that's why it sets off everything like this. And talking with him about that made me realize that that is the thing that is important at this point, is to make this less weird and less new. And that solidified some of my thinking on the way that I'm looking at suborbital tourism right now. In years past, I'd want to get so fixated on the market size, the current and future pricing, the projections. I'd get so fixated on

the specifics of Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin and what their business model is. And I think that was sourced from a place of like, boy, I hope these companies can make it. I hope they don't fizzle out. But the closer that we got to these moments, this is probably over the last year that I've started thinking about this more, that stuff isn't important to me or the things I care about, which is the development of space in general. It's important to talk about those things if you work at these companies and if you're worried about what the income is tomorrow. But for all of us out here, not the people listening that work at these companies, but all of us out here, you know, not the people listening that work these companies, but all of us out here looking in and not necessarily buying tickets for these, the

important thing is about how this is pushing everything forward and not necessarily about the ticky-tack specifics of the companies and how they're managing things. Because quite honestly, I don't care if Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin turn out to be 100-year companies, or maybe the companies will turn out to be 100-year companies, but do I care about a specific business line being as long-lasting as those other things would require? If you get the market and pricing right, you can last for a long time. Do I really care about that? Especially when we're at a time when it seems likely that there's some things coming around the corner that could make orbital tourism

significantly less expensive than it is currently? Because there's a pretty big price gap right now between the two. It's a couple of zeros difference between these flights and going up to the ISS. But if things go the way that you and I would like those zeros are going to start coming off pretty soon so I don't know if it's worth all the time that I would spend fixated on the specifics of the businesses and what I really care about is normalizing this kind of flight this kind of operation learning the things that we need to to support regular people going to space learning what it takes to actually prepare people for these flights, what they need and what they don't need.

You know, we're coming into this, and we have this model where everyone has to go through pretty extensive astronaut training, and I think that's going to be the case for a while. At some point in the future, if everything goes the way that we would like, that would not be required anymore, right? We all have this idea of being able to board a spaceship

like we're boarding an airplane. And yeah, there's the safety thing. We all listen to it with like an AirPod in or whatever. And we're like, if it comes to it, I have heard this enough that I will put my mask on before helping others. I know where the life vest is. I'm going to hug the shit out of this seat that I'm sitting on right now. And I won't think about how gross that is. We've all been there and we would like space flight to be there someday. Right now, it is not for a variety of reasons. You look at the sheer amount of people it takes to operate one of these launches. You look at the sheer amount of prep that it takes. There's so many things to work out and push on the boundaries of and bump up against the uncomfortable parts. There's a bunch of regulation that's happening

right now around how to manage airspace closures, a lot of regulation about who can and cannot fly to space. All of these things need to be pushed up against with actual flights to begin to make any changes in the operating environment that we're all looking at here. And I think there's just so many problems to solve there that matter for the long run that aren't necessarily about how much money someone's paying to sit in that seat, you know, and I think the difference is, like, the point at which somebody comes off one of these flights and isn't offered to come in and speak to their, like, elementary school or whatever, that's when we'll know that we got there. Once it's so uninteresting to your elementary school that you went to space, then we will

have been there. But to do that, we've got to solve all these other problems first. So what I care about with these companies is do they have sufficient demand to be able to fill a couple of flights a year? It certainly seems like that. Do they have the operational cadence to be able to fly pretty regularly and not have it be two or three times a year? I'm really hoping so. Can they work out all their different operational constraints to be able to make it less human intensive to run one of these launches?

Maybe not with these vehicles, but are they learning a bunch of things that they can feed in to the next one? of things that they can feed in to the next one. You know, all these different things that they need to figure out and find the edges of and bump up against and learn for next time helps in the future. Because if we think back in the history of really any technology or transportation specifically, none of those companies really made it. But there was an intern or a 20 or 30 something working at those companies that went on to run a great, huge enterprise in 30 years or whatever. And I guarantee you that's the case today, that there's a college intern, there's a 20 something working at Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin, and they're going to go on and they're going to run a company that I'm talking about

in 30 years on this podcast. And I'm a big proponent of the fact that companies don't have experience or expertise. People do. The people working there have the experience and expertise, and they will go somewhere else, and they will spread that. So whatever they're working on today is feeding into what they're working on tomorrow, and that's the stuff that really matters. So looking forward, I'm going to be a lot less concerned about how much money someone paid to do a flight and more about how frequently can these companies fly? How regular can they make it seem? What can they cut out of the training to get down to a quicker, less resource intensive process between signing up

and flying? What can they do to make progress in that way and to make everyone else in the world find it a little less weird that you're flying to space today. Now, the last thing I am curious about is to compare this past week or two that we've experienced and look towards the end of the year, the beginning of next year, when we see flights like Inspiration 4, Axiom 1, the first couple of orbital missions in this era that are tourist-focused. I want to see what the coverage is like around them. We won't have the culture war flashpoint of Branson and Bezos. We will have a billionaire or two involved, but they're not the kinds that spark a lot of the culture war stuff as these do. So will the messaging change at all there? Will the reactions

change? Will less people care because nobody's heard of Jared Isaac until this point? And you and I have, but has, you know, my friend that was talking to me about this space flight last Tuesday? Probably not. So I'm curious to compare the reactions and the relative way that it's accepted amongst, you know, mass media compared to these ones. That's a topic for another show. So we will get back to that. But for now, that is all I've got for you. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks to all your support, as always, over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. If you want to send me a question or comment, hit me up on email, anthonyatmainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. Until next time, thanks again.

I'll talk to you soon.