wings_club_sight_lecture_hard_cover_book_body_pages_FINAL2 TEST

There is, in fact, according to an analyst, an addressable market of millions of
individuals who may one day want to fly with us. Let’s see how we fare in this
room. Raise your hand if cost and safety is no issue, if you’d like to experience
space. I knew it was going to be my kind a crowd. So good to be with you.
We’re poised to exponentially increase the number of people who have
seen our planet from space. That’s a small but tangible step toward the true
democratization of spaceflight. It’s a meaningful leap towards opening space
to change the world for good.
View from Space on Virgin Galactic’s First Spaceflight
Astronauts have frequently talked about coming back to space. With a renewed
sense of community and oneness with humankind, a newfound appreciation for
our home planet, and the importance of keeping, and caring, and preserving
it, Virgin Galactic seeks to provide that experience, those core realizations, to
everyone, not just those who’ve been deemed to have the traditional right stuff.
In fact, we’ve come to learn that flying aboard SpaceShipTwo is widely accessible
to nearly all people. You don’t need to be an expertly trained sharp-eyed fighter
pilot to comfortably handle the very slight stresses of suborbital spaceflight,
nor to safely move around the cabin and make the most of the microgravity
experience at apogee.
Providing the astronaut experience to nontraditional astronauts is the key to
the Virgin Galactic vision. That is because when everyone, whether that be our
political leaders, businesspeople, entrepreneurs, public figures, scientists, our
neighbors, our friends, when they share firsthand the perspectives that astronauts
have long reported, the world becomes a little less big.
Finding answers to the issues we face here on
earth seem a little less challenging. Staring back
upon our planet from space, our differences seem
not so wide. Only 575 people have been to space
in the entirety of humanity’s space faring history.
Virgin Galactic currently has over 600 future
astronauts who have already put down deposits
to fly, and thousands more have expressed to us
an interest in doing so.
And of course, routine robust access to the valuable microgravity of suborbital
space will have a transformative impact on space science in the way that
the research community interacts with space. What we’ve seen through
SpaceShipTwo’s flights and the flights of other vehicles, is that suborbital
spaceflight provides researchers and scientists an ideal mixture of ease of
accessibility and cost affordability, with gentle loads and sustained exposure
to high quality microgravity, a Goldilocks zone of sorts for space science.
This coupled with the services that Virgin Galactic provides its research customers,
processes personnel facilities, offers a routine, reliable, and responsive service
allowing for experiments to be repeated rapidly and frequently if necessary, and
to be tended in flight by one or more researchers.
We believe this capability will enable scientific
experiments as well as educational research
programs to be carried out by a broader range of
individuals, organizations, and institutions, than
have ever had the experience before. One of the
fun things that I do is I periodically interact with
the leadership of the New Mexico Educational
Institution, since we’ll be based down in New Mexico.
And one of the fun brainstorms that we’ve had is what if you come to college at
NMSU or some other regional college, or maybe even some other college around
the United States of America, as a freshman, you begin planning your experiment,
pay attention students in the back here.
You begin planning your experiment and then you build that experiment in your
sophomore year, and then perhaps junior year or senior year. You fly to space
with that experiment and you operate that experience. How exciting that would
be? How much interest we would develop for STEM subjects and for aerospace
engineering if we could put such a program in place. It’s very exciting to think
about it.
Our team aspires to afford anybody with a bright idea or a novel experiment with
the opportunity to actually do it, to actually fly that experiment. No matter if it’s a
NASA scientist developing a thermal control system for landing on Mars, or a fifthgrade
classroom curious about whether lightning bugs light up in low gravity.
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