Brand Branson

TWENTY-THREE Australians are among the 600 people who have stumped up a cool $US200,000 each to be among the first space tourists with Virgin Galactic. The flights are expected to take place at the end of next year after Virgin test flights prove successful and the passengers undergo basic space training.

Flights on Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo will carry two pilots and six commercial passengers on a two and a half journey that will involve just six minutes of sub-orbital weightlessness 21,000m high. The idea is the latest brainwave of serial inventive British businessman Richard Branson who will be on the first scheduled flight with his family.

The entrepreneurial icon turned 62 in July but shows no sign of slowing down.

Where others see disaster, Branson sees opportunity.  CNN called him part Warren Buffett, part PT Barnum and an “unflappable inventor and promoter”.He has vast interests on six continents, including airlines, express trains, mobile phones and credit cards.

Branson was always an independent sort. Aged 16 he set up a magazine to put out a student point of view. “I didn't like the way I was being taught at school,” he said in 2006. “I didn't like what was going on in the world, and I wanted to put it right.” Plenty of advertisers were willing to stump up to reach the cashed-up youngsters reading Branson’s mag and his career was up and running.

He advertised records in the magazine and started selling them himself at a London store at discounted rates under the brand “Virgin”.In 1972 he launched Virgin Records and was approached by a struggling artist called Mike Oldfield to listen to his demo. Other companies thought Oldfield's instrumental work was unmarketable but Branson took a gamble. Oldfield’s Tubular Bells was the first record released by Virgin. The album took off after it was used as the theme music for the movie The Exorcist and by the end of 1973 it was a massive international success. Branson was always grateful to Oldfield and would later name one of his first Virgin America planes Tubular Belle.

Branson’s willingness to take a gamble paid off and he was at it again in 1976 when he signed the band the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten and his punk crew were controversial but they knew how to shift records. Though the band broke up before Branson made serious money out of them, they successful changed Virgin's image as a hippie label. In their wake, he signed up XTC, The Skids,The Culture Club, The Human League, and Sting. Virgin’s income went from a loss of £900,000 in 1980 to a profit of £11 million in 1983. In 1992 Branson was able to sell the music label to EMI for £0.5 billion. 

By then, Branson had broadened his scope with expensive airlines in his firing line. In his autobiography Losing My Virginity he explained why. “My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them,” he said. “From the perspective of wanting to live life to the full, I felt that I had to attempt it.” Just as his assault on the expensive record industry worked, the over-regulated airline market was also ripe for picking.

His Virgin Atlantic Airways was followed by Virgin Blue in Australia in 2000. Virgin Blue took full advantage of Ansett’s collapse a year later to become the country’s second largest airline. Internationally there was Virgin Trains and Virgin Mobile and even Virgin Comics as Branson spread his net far and wide. Meanwhile there was a succession of world record attempts, film appearances and humanitarian initiatives as Branson the man competed with Branson the brand. 

He was knighted in 2000 for “services to entrepreneurship” and he now gets rock star treatment wherever he goes. Last year, stadiums in Sydney and Melbourne were filled with people who forked out $300 a ticket to attend a “financial education summit” where Sir Richard was the star speaker.

Now at an age when many are reaching for the pipe and slippers, Branson is still reaching for the skies and beyond.

NASA at 50

Minnesota public radio is one of the many media currently celebrating this year’s fiftieth anniversary of NASA with a program yesterday on its history. The BBC also collected a series of videos of many of the space agency’s memorable moments, while Wired had an article about NASA’s half century of “towering achievements”. Kansas City Infozine interviewed several NASA veterans to talk about its accomplishments. The first of several 50th anniversary moments was last month with the signing of the act that brought NASA into existence.

The birth of NASA was the necessity of catching up with the Russians. On 4 October 1957, the Soviet news agency Tass announced to the world that the USSR had successfully placed Elementary Satellite 1 into an elliptical orbit about 900km above Earth. Elementary Satellite 1 became better known by its diminutive "Sputnik". It circled the globe every hour and a half and flew over America seven times a day, in almost taunting fashion. At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had taken a giant technological leap ahead of the US.

When the general American public read about Sputnik, there was much predictable shock and surprise. The Space Age had begun, and it had nothing to do with American might. Many others felt that the oceans could no longer protect the mainland and the Russians had intercontinental warhead capability. The Eisenhower administration rushed to reassure the American people, but also offered their congratulations to Moscow for its achievement. US scientists were simply excited knowing that Sputnik was just the incentive needed to get their satellite program up and running.

Public opinion was now massive in favour of the creation of an aggressive exploration of space. And so, on 29 July 1958 US President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act. The act would lead to the birth of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on 1 October that year. The act provided for “research into problems of flight within and outside the earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes.” It declared that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind and would require “adequate provision”. The act’s eight objectives were to expand knowledge of space, improve the quality of space vehicles, develop space travel for humans, establish long-range scientific studies, preserve the US role as leader in space, using military discoveries for civilian purposes, co-operation with other nations, and effective utilisation of US scientific and engineering know-how.

Since 1915, the field of aeronautic research had been the province of the National Advisory Commission for Aeronautics (NACA). NASA absorbed the NACA and kept the “Aeronautics” in its name. It also took NACA’s 8,000 employees, its $100 million annual budget, its three major research laboratories (Langley and Ames aeronautical laboratories and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory) as well as two smaller test facilities.

The new organisation launched into space exploration programs with Project Mercury. With a well-honed media instinct, NASA decided from the outset its space program would need to be manned in order to keep the public onside. In 1961, Mercury began to pay dividends. In May, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, with a 15-minute suborbital mission. Eight months later, John Glenn became the first true US astronaut when he orbited the Earth. Project Mercury’s six flights achieved the goal of putting piloted spacecraft into Earth orbit and retrieving the astronauts safely.

Project Gemini built on the carefully-planned success of Mercury. Gemini had two-person missions, re-entry rockets within the capsule and the ability to alter its orbit. But on 25 May 1961, President Kennedy raised the stakes again with his “special message to the Congress on urgent national needs”. Given just a month after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, This famous speech called for America to take “longer strides” and take a leading role in space achievement. He committed the US to landing a man safely on the moon by the end of the 1960s and ten billion dollars to fund it.

Kennedy's speech was pure gold to NASA. His estimate as to the cost of the Apollo program was grossly inadequate and it had ballooned out to $25.4 billion by the time it ended. The program overcame the setback of the fire to the Apollo 1 capsule on the ground that killed three astronauts. For all future missions, most flammable items were replaced with self-extinguishing materials, pure oxygen was replaced by a nitrogen-oxygen mixture at launch and the hatch was redesigned to open outward and to be removed quickly.

NASA’s crowning moment came when Neil Armstrong carried out Kennedy’s goal, on time (though over budget) on 20 July 1969. The 17th mission brought an end to the Apollo program in 1972 and NASA looked to new challenges. In 1975, they docked in space with a Russia Soyuz craft in the world’s first international manned space flight. When US astronaut Thomas Stafford shook hands with Soviet Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in the docking ring of joined Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft, it was an act that seemed to mark the end of the Space Race.

In the eighties, NASA returned to human spaceflight with the Space Shuttle program. The first flight of STS-1 (named “Columbia”) in 1981 demonstrated that it could take off vertically and glide to an unpowered airplane-like landing. But the 1986 Challenger disaster on take-off and the 2003 Columbia disaster on landing, seriously damaged NASA’s credibility and made it look for less awe-inspiring challenges. President Bush’s subsequent 25 year plan to return to the Moon and land on Mars has not met with the same enthusiasm as Kennedy’s earlier call.

But there have been many other successes in NASA’s unmanned program. The Hubble Space Telescope has greatly advanced cosmology and returned thousands of astonishing images after its mirror was fixed in 1993. NASA's scientific probes have explored the Moon and all the planets of the solar system except Pluto. Voyager 1 is now the further man-made object in space and is now in the heliosheath on the edge of interstellar space some 16 billion kms away from its home planet. And a new expanded space race is at hand with Japan, China and the EU joining the traditional players. American scientists now say they need the support of private enterprise to succeed in space. But despite concerns about its middle-aged spread, it is hard to imagine the future colonisation of space without some role for NASA.

The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace

The rise of online social networks continues unabated. Myspace has upward of a quarter million members. Facebook boasts another 60 million members storing 1.7 billion photographs. Meanwhile thousands of smaller sites have started to fill user niches to connect and talk about the most abstruse topics imaginable. All these sites promise a new cyberspace arena of equality and friendship.

In her book “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet” Australian philosopher Margaret Wertheim looks at the parallels between cyberspace and religion. As the subtitle suggests, the book looks at the way space has been treated through the centuries. She tracks how the “space” humans found for the religious soul was eventually squeezed out by science and the Enlightenment. Not until the advent of the internet and cyberspace does the soul have room to move again. The digital domain, argues Wertheim, is an attempt to realise a non-physical space for the ancient Christian concept of Heaven.

Wertheim quotes the similarities Umberto Eco saw between modern America and the last years of the Roman Empire. In both places strong government and social polity collapsed leaving society open to rupture and fragmentation. In Roman times, the feudal lords filled the gap, in modern times it is corporations. In Roman times the Christian religion emerged to fill a spiritual void. Today, Wertheim argues, cyberspace with its repackaged idea of Heaven fulfils the same need in a secular technological format.

The term “cyberspace” was invented by William Gibson in his 1984 sci-fi novel Neuromancer. For Gibson cyberspace was a “bodiless exaltation”. Others hailed the promise of cyberspace’s transcending possibilities. Psychologists suggest the disembodiment of the Internet appeals especially to young boys who are going through awkward physical transformations. The metaphor “surfing the net” conveys a real-world image of prowess and grace. Meanwhile the old Sanskrit word “avatar” (meaning the incarnation of a higher being) offers a whole new anonymous bodily experience in cyberspace in such domains as Second Life in what Wertheim calls an “outpouring of techno-religious dreaming”.

Wertheim traces the loss of a physical soul-space to the end of the Middle Ages. In his Divine Comedy, Florentine poet Dante Alighieri documented a trip to Hell, Purgatory and Heaven accompanied by Roman poet Virgil. This was a voyage through the Christian soul. Wertheim described it as a map of soul-space. Hell was in the centre of the earth (“abandon hope, all you who enter here”), Purgatory was an island in the southern hemisphere where people waited to be judged and Heaven was in the stars where the just ended up. Dante and Virgil wandered through all three kingdoms in a spiritual journey. All three are real places for Dante, even if it is only through his imagination he describes them.

Wertheim traces the victory of physical space to a contemporary of Dante, Giotto di Bondone. Giotto's mastery of perspective paintings gave the physical world a new splendour. His paintings allowed viewers to look through the physical space behind the picture plane. He created a virtual world for the subjects of his paintings. They reflected the changes in the Western zeitgeist that represented the world in a way that had no room for the ineffable Christian soul-space. In science Roger Bacon promoted the physical realm showing how it would lead to improvements in agriculture and medicine and could prolong human life.

The twofold reality of the Middle Ages was now under threat. Nicholas of Cusa laid out a new cosmology which unbounded space and insisted the Earth was not at the centre of the cosmos. Fifty years later obscure Polish priest Nicolaus Copernicus used his ample spare time to disprove the ancient Ptolemaic celestial clockwork model. Johannes Kepler took Copernicus’s work to demolish the distinction between celestial and terrestrial space. Everything in the sky, Kepler postulated, worked to the same natural physical laws as on Earth. Galileo proved Kepler right with his observational science. Descartes then gave infinite space a philosophical imprimatur that left no room for “God” to exist. It was up to Isaac Newton to synthesise the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Descartes to state a universal law of gravitation that worked for celestial bodies as much as earthly ones.

In the 20th century, space became more relativistic. Edwin Hubble made two great findings: he found there were multiple galaxies and then he made the devastating discovery they were all moving away from each other. The universe was expanding. Hubble was uncomfortable with his own findings and the almost religious conclusion the universe had a beginning and an end. Einstein found a mathematical model to explain the “general theory of relativity”. The velocity of light was the same relative to everything. This meant space and time were not absolute. The theory explained gravity, which was a by-product of the shape of space. Einstein’s theory gave way to hyperspace and its postulation of ten or eleven dimensions of space, string theory, and the possibility of a theory of everything. In the new cosmology mathematics was all; anything that couldn’t be expressed in numbers did not exist.

Computers thrived on numbers (especially 0s and 1s). The Internet is growing at an astonishing rate. Written in the late 1990s, Wertheim’s “Cyberspace” talked about an expansion of a thousand host computers to 37 million in 15 years. Blogs were unheard of 1997 now there are 70 million or more. Cyberspace is a new place to socialise and play for billions of people. Most importantly to Wertheim, it is not subject to the laws of physics. It therefore returns us to a dualistic theory of reality. People create new identities which has the potential to split the self into a radical multiplicity. It is a new form of “self space” which exists independently of physical space.

In the final chapter, Wertheim returns to the religious theme of the title. She quotes a Virtual Reality guru Kevin Kelly who said the internet was a syncretic version of Christian ritual. In cyberspace, bodies do not age and perfection is possible. Sci-fi writers maintain cyber-immortality is possible. Freed from the prison of our bodies, our cyber-souls will soar into “the infinite space of the digital ether”. Yet it is the all-too-human communal aspect that gives the social network sites their attraction. The Internet becomes an “electronic agora” where people rebuild the communities lost in mall culture. It is a communal inner space of humanity’s own making.