

December 18, 2009 2:58 AM

I love that word: “Breakthrough.” I give a lot of lectures talking about a lot of elements of breakthroughs, and I've got just a few minutes, so I'll share some of those with you tonight.

First of all, this is the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight, October 4, 1961—45 years ago. It's also the two-year anniversary of us winning the X Prize, and today the X Prize people have announced their new prize for human gene mapping, and I've been honored to be a little bit—a part of that. They're offering a $10-million prize for the first person who can map 100 people in 10 days, and I'm one of those 100 people, so that'll be kind of cool.

I want to point out that breakthroughs, really, are enormously significant, because we look forward to something that's totally different—or better—and just that fact that we do, I think, is the main thing that separates us from the other species on this planet. Looking forward to something that's better and working hard for something, and a breakthrough. I make the point that you have to have confidence in nonsense in order to have a breakthrough, because that's why a lot of these breakthrough guys are kind of weird. Not everyone that's come up here tonight is weird, but I certainly fall within that category. And before a breakthrough is recognized as a breakthrough, generally the consensus is, “Well, that's nonsense.” And, if you think about it, if you have the initiative to go out there and try something that people don't think will work, and that you don't know yourself will work, you've got to have confidence in nonsense to even play in that field. So that's why the folks who are sensical and the folks who work to a pattern and the folks who do government research are usually not going to have a breakthrough, because they won't take the kind of risks and they won't keep going after something, when it doesn't work at first.

I have a goal. When you get more than 60 years old, something hits you flat in the face, and that is to say, “What do you want to see happen while you're still alive?” I don't remember ever thinking of that before I was 60, and I got to thinking about the time I started this attempt—to see if my little shop, without NASA knowing anything about it, and without an aerospace prime doing it, could we do a manned spaceflight? I got to thinking, “Well, what do I want to see while I still am around?” And unless these genome-mapping guys can go out and extend life to 200 or 300 or 400 years, I've got a short-term plan here to start thinking of what I'd like to do.

And what I came up with—and I think this is important for all of us when you get to a certain age, to kind of plan what you're going to do for the rest of your life by what you want to see happen, and so that tended to happen to me, I don't know why, but—my goal was to see affordable access to fly to the moon by the general public. And I set that out there as something that, I believe, based on what I'd done in developing at that time—37 different manned airplane types, working on military aircraft and sitting back and enjoying these wonderful technologies that have come in lately—and I think most of them are enablers, and that is to see what I could do to make that happen.

And I've looked at the progress made toward that goal, and why little kids dream about that goal, have been on kind of a downhill track. There is a lot less expectation for them to go to the moon than there was in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. And the reason for that is there's been a generation and a half already of time in which that goal seems to be further away than it was in ’69. And I'm particularly upset to see that our next generation, our next decade and a half of work with taxpayer-funded research through NaySA, excuse me, NASA, shows that we are structuring that program to go back to the moon, knowing beforehand that all we're really going to do is prove that it's too dangerous and too expensive for the public to do it. And the reason that we're doing that is for cost, because, gee, we don't want to take risks and do something new. But, my point is, you need to have breakthroughs in order to make that happen for our kids. In order to make me see it and be able to go to the moon myself, you have to have breakthroughs in availability and safety. I don't like that fact that we have a lot of taxpayer-funded—now another $120 billion—aimed at something that will only show that it will not be possible.

That is why I said there's got to be something different to kind of get this thinking started. That is why the SpaceShipOne program was not just a demonstration that three dozen guys in a little shop in the desert can do a manned space program. That accomplishment was certainly rewarding and interesting and fun, and it got a lot of media attention, but what the media didn't pay a lot of attention to is that, in doing that, we reached out and tried some real new stuff: A new type of hybrid rocket motor, a new type of re-entry into the atmosphere that would be considerably safer than any other type of re-entry method. We didn't have to do that, but I felt that we had to have breakthroughs in order to just space flights to the public for sub-orbital flights, which are relatively easy, compared to orbital. Now, we did try that, and all of them worked, and I looked back at my program, the big risks that I took—everything—worked. And I conclude that I didn't take enough risks, I didn't reach out far enough.

But we did go far enough to give us confidence that we can move directly to an operational system which can fly very large numbers of people, and that's what we're doing now. We anticipate…. We're not giving a schedule for this, but we anticipate building spaceships for many space-flying companies to operate and to compete with each other. And I expect that the ship we're developing right now—that type which we're just calling SpaceShipTwo at the moment—that that type will fly 100,000 people out of the atmosphere in the first 10 or 12 years of its operation.

So we're really looking forward to doing something that in itself is not new technology beyond what I demonstrated two years ago with SpaceShipOne. But the difference is, when you get a whole bunch of people out there flying, all of a sudden it attracts a lot of investment, because it's a very profitable business…. You see what they're charging for the initial flights; it's very profitable business. They're flying the billionaires first, right? Another thing that tells you this is going to be not short of investment to push it along is before—well before there is an adequate spaceship to fly the public, there's already been more than $1 billion worth of investment in spaceship ports in six different states in the United States and five different countries in the world, committed funds to build space ports. And they're counting that there will be spaceships that will be safe enough to fly the public. So I don't think that this is going to be hampered by investment—the fact that it is very profitable compared to if I went out and developed a general aviation airplane, or if I went out and developed an airliner. The break-even number of years is only about half of what it would be for those other two activities.

However, I think what historians will look back at what finally happened at this decade now, that didn't happen in the 70s and 80s and 90s—and, again, when I say “finally,” that is a big deal—us going back to the moon, we won't even make it 50 years after Neil Armstrong, and that's kind of crazy. We went to the moon in only eight years after somebody flew out of the atmosphere. See, it was a big spurt.

But here's the thing: I'm really focused on inspiring the kids, because I've been able to track and find that the people who were really inspired by the big surge of airplane development. Those little kids turn out to be our leaders who brought us to the moon, and our leaders who brought our very best technology out of the Lockheed Skunk Works and so on. And I look around and I see that we're inspiring our kids by having a new model of a cell phone with video in it. And that has nothing to do with discovery, it has nothing to do with adventure, it has nothing to do with risk, it has nothing to do with a goal that humans have always had—and that is to go to a more dangerous place and colonize it, just because it seemed like a cool thing to do. And the fact that we did that is why we're still here, and why our species didn't go extinct. I hope to see—by having this flourish of activity, and having every kid know…. And I think we're within 10 or 15 years of this…. Every kid will know that if he wants to, he can go to orbit in his lifetime. We're not there yet, but I believe in about that amount of time that that will be the prevailing thinking, and that in itself will drive kids into science and engineering instead of into all those really bad stuff, like lawyers. Thank you very much.

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