Godspeed Sir Richard Branson 🚀

His launch webcast today: www.VirginGalactic.com Success! Safe landing and epic flight today.

I am reminded of Sir Arthur Clarke’s prescient passage in the Virgin Galactic book SpaceShipOne:

“Enter Citizen Astronauts. Escaping from Earth will not always be astronomically expensive; the energy needed to reach space is remarkably small.
‘We have to get away, as quickly as possible, from today’s missile-oriented philosophy of rocket launchers which are discarded after a single flight.’

When I wrote these words in July 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts were on their way to the moon.

I envisaged that the true Space Age would dawn ‘…and projects which today are barely feasible will become not only relatively easy but economically self-supporting. The closing years of this century should see the beginnings of commercial space flight, which will be directed first toward giant manned satellites or space platforms within a thousand miles above the Earth’s surface.’ [think ISS]

Well in those heady days of Apollo, I couldn’t have anticipated all the detours and distractions of the 1970s that delayed our optimistic projections.

Commercial space flight is now beginning to be technologically feasible and soon will become economically viable. The rise of citizen astronauts has already begun — this time, I doubt if politics can hold up progress because it is no longer so closely tied to the fluctuating interests and resources of national governments.

Fortunately, we need not rely solely on governments for expanding humanity’s presence beyond the Earth.
In that sense, space travel is returning to where it started: with maverick pioneers dreaming of journeys to orbit and beyond”

Go Dreamers, go, go, go!