Branson’s space failure proves he’s no Elon Musk

Virgin Orbit’s dud launch in Cornwall this week leaves the British billionaire light years behind his American rival

I‘In the billionaire space race, Sir Richard was already trailing Bezos’

t may not have been one small step for man, but it was certainly a giant step backwards for Sir Richard Branson. Like most serial entrepreneurs the colourful tycoon is no stranger to failed ventures but Sir Richard has become something of a specialist in duds.

There was Virgin Red, a regional airline that lasted all of two years; Virgin Cola, which succeeded in capturing all of 0.5pc of the soft drinks market before it was run out of town by the big brands; Virgin clothing, which unsurprisingly failed to be a fashion hit with the kids – or anyone, for that matter; and the less said about Virginware, which closed with a fire sale of 35,000 pairs of Virgin-branded bras and G-strings, the better.

Yet for someone who has reportedly set up more than 400 companies under the Virgin umbrella, the aborted attempt to put Britain firmly on the space exploration map with the first-ever launch of a satellite from home soil must surely count among his most high profile and spectacular flops to date.

If Virgin Orbit’s Launcherone rocket had been powered by hype alone then it would surely have gone where no other spacecraft had gone before, and that includes the Starship Enterprise.

Tickets to watch “Cosmic Girl” take-off – albeit strapped to a jumbo jet, initially – from Newquay airport in Cornwall sold out faster than Glastonbury. Which was ironic, perhaps, given how many of the festival’s attendees return home looking like they’ve spent most of the weekend on another planet.

The Rolling Stones’ hit Start Me Up provided the soundtrack, though the cynics were quick to point out that You Can’t Always Get What You Want may have been more apt given the outcome.

The aircraft took to the skies at 10pm, travelling around 50 miles off the south-west coast of Ireland before deploying the rocket at 11.10pm. Less than an hour later, Virgin Orbit announced it was tumbling back to Earth with its payload of nine expensively assembled satellites.

Shares in the company took a similar flight path, crashing by 12pc in New York, where it is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

It is easy to sneer at Sir Richard’s misfortune, but he deserves credit for trying. Britain could certainly do with a dose of swashbuckling derring-do to help drag it out of its current fug. But whichever way you look at it, the entire escapade is another blow to Sir Richard’s enduring ambition to conquer space in one form or another.

His efforts certainly won’t trouble Elon Musk or Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with whom the Virgin boss shares a healthy, but still intense, rivalry when it comes to space exploration.

In the billionaire space race, Sir Richard was already trailing Bezos before the Cornwall fiasco. Yet it wasn’t that long ago that the pair seemed to be more or less neck-and-neck as they prepared to launch competing flights into space within days of each other.

In July 2021, after nearly 17 years of preparation, false dawns and mishaps – plus more than $1bn (£820m) ploughed into his Virgin Galactic “space tourism” outfit – the company’s VSS Unity rocket plane kissed the edge of space before executing a backflip in microgravity 53.5miles above the Earth, then gliding back down safely. Sir Richard, who was on board with three Virgin Galactic employees, said he had “dreamt of this moment” since he was “a kid”. He beat Bezos by nine days.

Fast forward just three months, and their fortunes had diverged dramatically. While Bezos’s Blue Origin had chalked up two more space missions, repairs and upgrades forced Virgin Galactic to postpone any further flights, presumably to the consternation of the 600 other dreamers that had forked out an estimated $200,000 to $250,000 for a ticket.

It was the latest in a series of setbacks that include a rocket engine explosion on the ground in 2007 that killed three employees; a test ship malfunction during re-entry in 2011; and the break-up of the VSS Enterprise plane during flight in 2014 that killed one of its co-pilots.

Comparisons with Musk’s Spacex are not entirely fair. Though Spacex rockets have repeatedly exploded on the launchpad, Musk appears to have learned from his mistakes more quickly, enabling him to take space exploration to an altogether different level.

Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin specialise in suborbital space travel in which passengers journey to the edge of space to experience a few minutes of near-weightlessness but Spacex has conquered orbital travel – an altogether different experience and far more difficult to pull off.

The former has been compared to poking your head into space very briefly, whereas the latter sees commercial astronauts typically spending multiple days or weeks immersed in space in exchange for tens of millions of dollars. In a dig at rivals, company benefactor Jared Isaacman described its missions as not “a joyride”.

But it is just a small part of what Spacex does. It has flown cargo and crew to the International Space Station scores of times after establishing close ties with Nasa, though Spacex claims its astronauts will beat the space agency to Mars by at least a decade.

In a funding round only last week, Spacex was valued at $137bn. Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit, after share price falls of 70pc and 80pc respectively, have a combined value of less than $1.6bn. In the space race, Musk is light years ahead of others.