Branson Goes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/01/technology/richard_branson_underwater_plane/

Branson Goes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
by Blake Ellis
Monday, February 1, 2010

NEW YORK -- Virgin unveiled the latest addition to Richard Branson's luxury fleet on Friday: an underwater plane that will fly riders into the depths of the Caribbean Sea.

Guests on Necker Island, a retreat in the British Virgin Islands, will be able to dive underwater in a submarine dubbed the Necker Nymph for $25,000 a week. But that's only after shelling out around $300,000 for a one-week stay on Necker, the private island owned by billionaire and Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson.

Beginning on Feb. 20, two riders and a pilot and will be able to take the plunge from land, or from a boat. The underwater plane uses the downward pressure on its wings to fly through the water for up to two hours at a time, while an open cockpit will give riders a 360-degree view.

The Necker Nymph's typical speed is 2 to 5 nautical miles per hour and it can dive more than 100 feet, said Karen Hawkes, a spokeswoman for Hawkes Ocean Technologies, the company that designed the Nymph.

A statement released Friday by Virgin Limited Edition, the luxury arm of Virgin Hotels, described the Nymph's launch like a plane's takeoff. "Gliding on the water's surface like an aeroplane on a runway, one of the three pilots will operate the joystick to smoothly dive down."

Vacationers will be able to fly the Necker Nymph while chartering the Necker Belle, Branson's 105-foot yacht, or the submarine can be launched from shore. Necker Belle is rented out to guests for $88,000 a week, bringing the full Necker Island experience to more than $400,000 per week.

Riders must follow SCUBA procedures and be trained or accompanied by a certified pilot before entering the underwater plane. SCUBA tanks are mounted in the submarine and passengers must wear masks while underwater, said Hawkes.

The Necker Nymph claims "near-zero" environmental impact because its "positive buoyancy prevents the sub from landing on a reef, and its low light and noise emissions ensure the fragile ocean ecosystems remain undisturbed," Virgin said.

Branson opens doors to spaceship

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/12/07/branson.spaceship/

Branson opens doors to spaceship
December 8, 2009
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson unveils spacecraft
Media and prospective space-ride tourists get a peek at SpaceShipTwo
Virgin Galactic has deposits from 300 people toward $200,000 tickets
Branson says the first flight into space will launch in 2011 in New Mexico

Mojave, California (CNN) -- Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson on Monday unveiled the winged rocket his company developed to give paying customers a brief taste of space.

The 300 people who have given Branson's Virgin Galactic $20,000 deposits toward the $200,000 space-ride tickets were invited see SpaceShipTwo in its Mojave, California, hangar. CNN was given an early peek.

The first flight in 2011 -- after 18 months of testing -- will launch from a spaceport under construction in New Mexico, Branson said.

Another aircraft will carry the 60-foot-long SpaceShipTwo to 60,000 feet above the Earth, where "they will drop away and they will then go to 2,000 miles per hour in 10 seconds, where they get propelled into space," Branson said.

Its hybrid rocket motor -- still under development -- will reach a suborbital altitude high enough to reach the edges of space and weightlessness, according to Branson.

"Once in space, [passengers] will unbuckle their seats," he said. "There are enormous windows, which no spacecraft has had before, for them to look back at the Earth. They can float around and become astronauts."

The cabin, which seats six paying passengers, is 90 inches -- nearly 9 feet -- in diameter, which provides "lots of room for zero-G fun," Branson's Web site said.

The first voyage will carry Branson, his wife, mother and children, the entrepreneur said. "Actually, that's my mum on the side -- a younger version of my mum on the side of the spaceship," he said.

After just a few minutes of space tourism, SpaceShipTwo will glide back to Earth, landing where it began the trip in New Mexico, he said.

About 80,000 people have placed their names on the waiting list for seats on SpaceShipTwo and its successors.

"What we want to be able to do is bring space travel down to a price range where hundreds of thousands of people would be able to experience space, and they never dreamed that [they] could," Branson said.

He said he hopes the technology will lead to a new form of Earth travel, jetting people across oceans and continents faster through suborbital routes.

"We would love at some stage, obviously subject to government approval, to take the engineers and start looking at shrinking the world," Branson said.

The spacecraft was based on the technology and carbon-composite construction developed for SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X Prize in 2004 for the first privately funded human flight to the edge of space.

The reusable spacecraft is a joint effort by aviation designer Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic, a space tourism venture that is a subsidiary of Branson's Virgin Group.