Virgin founder and one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our time, Sir Richard Branson recently gave an interview to British magazine T3. Besides the talk about Virgin Galactic and that manned space flights with SpaceShipTwo might be just a few months away he mentioned another very interesting topic. As a next step after Virgin Galactic was successfully launched, it seems like Virgin has big plans to change the face of commercial aviation like we know it today.
According to Branson, Virgin engineers are very keen to see if they can create an aircraft that enables very fast transcontinental travel using technology used in Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo/WhiteKnightTwo. He hates to see that great technology like the supersonic Concorde just disappeared, has been scraped and probably will never come back. A new Virgin intercontinental rocket plane will allow to “send people from London to Australia in a fraction of the time that it currently takes to go there, maybe two and a half hours, two hours”, he said.
Being asked about details how this will actually work from a technological point, he added “When I talk about intercontinental travel it is possible that you’ll travel into space on the way to Australia and pop back down again. You can become an astronaut on your way to Australia. It is the most exciting thing Virgin has yet done.”
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