Like a Virgin

REACH FOR THE SKIES

If you decide to tackle an engineering challenge or to venture into the scientific unknown as an entrepreneur, you’re embarking on a real adventure-difficult, fascinating, often risky. Sometimes you and your team might feel quite alone, while at others you might choose to partner with friends or even your competitors. It’s important to remember that we all learn from and build on others’ accomplishments-as I’ve written before, an entrepreneur does not succeed alone.

This idea was driven home to me one time when my publisher came to visit me to discuss the next book. I had imagined this would be another project based on my business experiences, but he surprised me when he said, ‘There’s this great passage in your autobiography where you nearly get yourself killed.’

‘Really?’ I responded, ‘Which one? There have been quite a few!’

Unimpressed he continued, ‘Do you recall in the mid-1970s when a chap called Richard Ellis got you to try out his early form of hang glider?’

I told him that I remembered all too well. The contraption was called a Pterodactyl. I took off in it by mistake and nearly killed myself but, tragically, just a few days later Richard actually did kill himself in the thing. ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘Ellis died, and you escaped by the skin of your teeth. What we were wondering was, what on earth made either of you want to take those kinds of insane risks?’

Why? Well, for starters let’s not forget that Richard Ellis was one of the inventors of the Pterodactyl Ascender series of hang gliders. A few years after the crash, Jack Peterson Jr flew a Pterodactyl across the continental United States in 120-mile hops. His machine now hangs in the Smithsonian right next to SpaceShipOne, the first private manned space vehicle, which was designed by Burt Rutan.

‘Well…’ I began slowly, not exactly happy with where this conversation was going, ‘there was the thrill, obviously. It seemed like a great adventure. And then there was the whole sponsorship thing. Ellis wanted me to champion this new form of flying.’ And then there was…The more I talked, the more ‘and then there was’ connections I uncovered. ‘You know hang glider wings are based on a design that was supposed to bring NASA’s Mercury capsules down to Earth? This of course ties in with what we’re doing with Burt Rutan at Virgin Galactic. Re-entry is the toughest challenge for any space vehicle, and I stopped. The publisher was grinning.

Soon we had a book, which we titled Reach for the Skies in homage to my childhood hero, British flying ace Douglas Bader. It’s about flight but much more than that; it’s about the people behind the inventions and accomplishments.

If you’re considering a project that involves technical challenges, remember that, long before innovators have the right materials at hand, we already know how to achieve our dreams. Look at the history of flight: the workings of intercontinental air travel were being hashed out by textile engineers John Stringfellow and William Henson nearly sixty years before the first aeroplane flight.

Then, the process of engineering those materials will require teamwork, self-reliance and bucket-loads of goodwill. To achieve a nonstop flight between London and Paris, Charles Lindbergh’s team adopted working methods that wouldn’t look out of place in our spaceship factory in the Mojave Desert.

Throughout my career, I have been deeply involved in projects that have pushed the envelope of manned flight. While I am known for drawing attention to Virgin, none of our experiments were mere publicity ‘stunts’; they were steps in our research and development process. Swedish aeronaut Per Lindstrand and I crossed the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon in 1987 and the Pacific in 1991, setting records that still stand. The envelopes of those balloons were made of incredibly high-tech materials as radical then as Virgin Galactic’s space-faring composites are today.

Once you’ve solved all those engineering challenges, you’ll have to figure out how you’re going to turn your hard work into money. Drawing attention to your new idea or invention helps, but you’ll need a business plan.

But this working method, with its components of engineering, adventure, celebrity and business, was not invented by the Virgin team, though it has carried me from a student magazine to the edges of outer space.

This approach drew admiration, criticism and incredulity long before Queen Victoria’s parliament rang with laughter at the preposterous idea of a world airline; long before startled peasants took pitchforks to Jacques Charles’ gas balloon in 1783. It takes a very long time to build a business. At Virgin, my team and I build for the future. And the future’s wild.