Richard Branson Quotes

With space travel, [it's] no different. You know, in 1990 I read the name Virgin Galactic Airways. Loved the name. And set out to try to find an engineer or rocket scientist in the world who could build a safe, reusable rocket that could take people to and from space and we could start a whole new era of commercial space travel.

In my mind, public space travel will precede efforts toward exploration -- be it returning to the moon, going to Mars, visiting asteroids, or whatever seems appropriate. We've got millions and millions of people who want to go into space, who are willing to pay. When you figure in the payload potential of customers, everything changes.

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism.

With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.

The bigger shift in space exploration won't be commercial crew - that will be a validation of something we already knew was going to be the case. It will be when you have a fully private company launching everyday citizens. When people know people in their communities who have been to space on a daily basis.

Not everyone can be an astronaut and go into space, some people with sufficient resources can purchase and fly sub-orbitally thanks to various companies and for more money (considerably) fly into orbit.

The same way people are now paying a couple thousand dollars to fly to other parts of the world, people will be paying $50,000 to spend a weekend on a space station.

Space travel will be like every other business. There will be competitors. . . . Thirty months from now, I'm confident we'll be flying people into space.

Before the current decade ends, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing suborbital flights aboard privately funded vehicles. . . . It won't be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: "I want to work 200 kilometers from home-straight up!"

I've been lucky enough to have flown some very interesting aircraft in the past, but SpaceShipTwo is far and away the most exciting of them all.

I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I've got kids and responsibilities, so I can't be my own test pilot. That wouldn't be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it's a sensible thing to do.

From day one, I have been told I am no different from the male astronauts. As a pilot, I flew in the sky. Now that I am an astronaut, I will fly in space.

Point-to-point transit via low orbit could dramatically speed up international flights, connecting the world even further. And safe, consistent space travel opens up the possibility of commercial space stations, trips to the moon and exploration beyond.

Not long after I got my test pilot qualification, I realised there was no manned space flight programme in the U.K., and there was unlikely to be one.

I have watched SS2 evolve over the years into an incredible vehicle that is going to open up space to more people than ever before.

It's very sad that there's going to be a hiatus in manned space flight from the U.S. The Shuttle was a fantastic, hugely complex vehicle. It was inevitable it would come to an end, but this is the opportunity for the commercial world to get involved. As the Shuttle era ends, another window of opportunity opens.

By 1973, we had a space station, the Skylab, and we had multiple probes going up to planets. So, all this wonderful stuff happened in 10 to 15 years. About that time, there should have been enormous initiatives to make it affordable for people to fly in space, not just a handful of trained NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts.

I'd like to go to another planet, which I might live long enough to accomplish. Just get on a spaceship and go. But not the moon. I don't see any flowers there. The moon is too close. I want to go further.

The fact that the Virgin logo was on the side of SpaceShipOne on October 4th, 2004 was fantastic.

There is a potential to be a big explosion of what spaceflight is gonna mean to just an everyday person in the near future. I think it's very hopeful for our young people: all the exciting things that they could be doing in the future relative to space and space exploration.

All the best to SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, and, yes, the Progress teams, who are all working on their own solutions to open the frontier along with Boeing and the rest of the fliers trying to fly, all of whom I know personally share the dream. This isn't their fault; they just want to make things fly.

The bottom line is 2018 should finally be the year where we see the early stages of broad-based commercial space tourism appear. Demand will certainly be driven by the early successes or failures of those missions, the marketing of those missions, as well as the propensity for tourists to become repeat flyers.

You can picture pretty easily if there were a paying passenger aboard a rocket that failed, like Challenger failed. Certainly it would be a tragedy, and a tragedy for the company. They would have a hard time recovering from it.

Since Yuri Gagarin and Al Shepard's epoch flights in 1961, all space missions have been flown only under large, expensive government efforts. By contrast, our program involves a few, dedicated individuals who are focused entirely on making spaceflight affordable.