David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…They actually closed down new tickets at this point, right? They haven’t sold another ticket since. I believe it was actually after what happens next that they closed new ticket sales. Unfortunately—George has said this often—space is hard and this is new stuff. In September of 2014, Branson goes on David Letterman, he says, we’re so close, I think we’re going to have the first passenger flight in the beginning of next year in February or March of 2015. Who knows if that may or may not have happened. Very tragically, the second major tragedy in Virgin’s history happens on October 31st, Halloween 2014. They’re doing a test flight of SpaceShipTwo. They had just switched out the fuel system to a new type of fuel and the SpaceShipTwo, the original one they had VSS Enterprise breaks apart in mid-air during the test flight after it's released from the mothership. The co-pilot Michael Alsbury is killed, and the pilot Peter Siebold survives, but he’s seriously injured. This is obviously not the headline you want. It’s tragic, period, but not the headlines you want when you're trying to attract customers to come and reserve tickets on your new space line, to have to craft a blow up in mid air. Just enormously sad. Both tragedy’s so sad in their own right, but the fact that they’re both so different, too, and so many years apart. It just shows what early day it still is for humans trying to go to space.…

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