You can be an astronaut.
That’s the message that William Pomerantz brought to the College of Business Administration last week, when he spoke to a packed room of Executive MBA students about his work at Virgin Galactic and the company’s plans to take paying customers into space.
Pomerantz, the company’s vice president of special projects, discussed the history of how space travel went from the province of government to private enterprise. He pointed to SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded vehicle to fly into space and back, which happened in 2004.
While a typical flight on NASA’s space shuttle cost over $1 billion, SpaceShipOne was built and flown for roughly $25 million, he said. “Government is very good at being a pioneer in new fields of science, but it’s not good at bringing down prices.”
But if private enterprise built a successful spaceship ten years ago, how come Virgin Galactic still isn’t flying customers into space? Pomerantz offered an answer appropriate for a business school: market data.
It turns out that potential customers are looking for a few key features in their space flights—like the ability to float weightless in space, or have a beautiful view of planet Earth—that weren’t available in the cramped, windowless SpaceShipOne. But in addition to building a better space craft, Pomerantz said Virgin Galactic’s investor Richard Branson is more interested in building a sustainable business.
“We want to build a company that’s going to change the course of human history,” he said. And while Virgin’s waiting list is 700 people long and growing, “nobody really knows how deep and robust this market is.”
Pomerantz began his talk with a pre-emptive defense of spending on space-related research, touching on the possibility of environmental collapse on Earth, the potential riches from mining asteroids or other planets, and the social value of innovations that have come out of space in years past.
The strongest example he offered was storms like Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy, which would have caused even more destruction and deaths if there had been no satellite weather systems floating in Earth’s orbit to give us advance warning of the storms’ strength and paths. But even this example falls short when describing the potential of space, he said.
“The universe is the most infinite thing that our minds can conceive of. If you could sum up (space research) in an elevator speech, that’d be terrible,” Pomerantz said. “This is the future of our species that we’re talking about.”