{"id":112589,"date":"2020-09-06T05:23:36","date_gmt":"2020-09-06T12:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/inside-virgin-orbit-richard-bransons-small-satellite-bid-to-match-musk-and-bezos-in-the-billionaire-space-race"},"modified":"2020-09-06T11:33:02","modified_gmt":"2020-09-06T18:33:02","slug":"inside-virgin-orbit-richard-bransons-small-satellite-bid-to-match-musk-and-bezos-in-the-billionaire-space-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/inside-virgin-orbit-richard-bransons-small-satellite-bid-to-match-musk-and-bezos-in-the-billionaire-space-race","title":{"rendered":"Inside Virgin Orbit, Richard Branson\u2019s Small Satellite Bid To Match Musk And Bezos In The Billionaire Space Race"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/inside-virgin-orbit-richard-bransons-small-satellite-bid-to-match-musk-and-bezos-in-the-billionaire-space-race2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Fellow rocket man Elon Musk reacted with sympathy. \u201cSorry to hear that. Orbit is hard,\u201d he tweeted, adding that it took his firm, SpaceX, four attempts before reaching orbit in September 2008. Branson himself \u201cwaited an hour\u201d before getting on the phone to CEO Dan Hart. \u201cHis brain, as it does, just immediately turns to \u2013 \u2018well how quickly can you try again\u2019?\u201d Pomerantz recalls, describing the mood in the room as the sun set in California as \u201ca big step forward that nevertheless was nowhere near as big as we wanted it to be \u2013 we are a way better company than we were the day we did that launch, but we didn\u2019t get to orbit.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><b><strong>Back Of A Napkin<\/strong><\/b><\/p>\n<p>But for Pomerantz, Branson, Virgin and the watching entrepreneurial world, including competitors like SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, a larger question was answered: Could Richard Branson drop a rocket off the wing of a Virgin aircraft and call it a business?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fellow rocket man Elon Musk reacted with sympathy. \u201cSorry to hear that. Orbit is hard,\u201d he tweeted, adding that it took his firm, SpaceX, four attempts before reaching orbit in September 2008. Branson himself \u201cwaited an hour\u201d before getting on the phone to CEO Dan Hart. \u201cHis brain, as it does, just immediately turns to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,2019,2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-elon-musk","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112589"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112605,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112589\/revisions\/112605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}