Is there any single image of human accomplishment greater than Neil Armstrong standing on the surface of the Moon, and the monument that stands there? “We came in peace, for all mankind.” Like many children, I fed on images of spaceflight, from documentaries of the landing and the pulp science fiction worlds of Star Trek and Doctor Who. Space means achievement and the progress of man-kind.

Yet the question is often asked, “What happened to the future?” 2001 is a decade behind us, and there is no occupied space colony, with or without an insane computer to govern it. The feeling of disappointment is palpable. Bruce Charlton, professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham, writes “The standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to.” He suggests that all this is ‘BS’, adding, “I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-1975, at the time of the Apollo moon landings, and has been declining ever since.”

The same uneasiness seems to surface in each US political cycle. In 2005, George W. Bush proposed a manned mission to mars. Barack Obama pledged a further $6 billion to NASA, saying that the end-goal was ‘the capacity for people to operate and live safely beyond the earth’. Right on cue the presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich announced an American moonbase by 2020, adding that, when there were 13,000 prospective Americans living on the moon, it could then apply to become a new US state. Asked about this and the backlash that has come from it, he stressed that this ‘was not a slip’. “[It was] a deliberate effort to start a conversation on the topic at a time when the Chinese, the Indians and the Russians are aggressively moving into space”. All of these proposals have met with varying degrees of opposition.

It is therefore both fitting and ironic that the next generation of spacecraft is being constructed without any government aid or subsidy. Elon Musk, the man behind Paypal, co-founded the private space company SpaceX, and has devoted himself to getting all the way to Mars. Meanwhile, Robert Bigelow, Las Vegas billionaire is investing $500 million in the world’s first private space station. The most prominent of these efforts though, is Virgin Galactic, launched by entrepreneur Richard Branson. Founded in 2004, its website offers private trips into space at the price of $20,000, and it has been claimed to handle all of its work with a budget equivalent in the equivalent of one NASA shuttle flight.

It was with this in mind that I interviewed the former President of Virgin Galactic, Will Whitehorn. He has recently stepped down from his position as president, handing over the responsibilities of the role to the ex chief of staff of NASA, George Whitesides. US law mandates that only a US citizen may head a company operating in space. Whitehorn has moved on to the UK government’s science and technology council and directing the Loewy group.

Originally from Scotland, Whitehorn was headhunted in 1986, by the Virgin Group. “I was approached by Sir Richard to join the company. I was only 26 at the time. Virgin had, in total, about 250 employees, and I relished the prospect of going to work for this young entrepreneurial company that had just launched an airline”. Whitehorn recalls, “Looking through my CV, Richard Branson saw that I had been part of a helicopter search-and-rescue in the North Seas, and he said ‘That’ll be handy’. And I said, ‘Why is that?’, and he said “Because I am about to fly a balloon across the Atlantic, and then I’m going to fly it across the pacific so you can look after my search-and-rescue on both of those. Both of which ended up happening.”

I ask him what it is like working for Sir Richard.

“Richard Branson is a fascinating person to work for. He is one of these characters who is highly intelligent who was never formally educated, because he was very dyslexic when he was young, and found it very difficult to pass his exams.” This did not stop Branson from forming the UK’s first student newspaper that would later be sold to the NUS and is now sold as The National Student. “Having overcome that disability in later life, he has become a voracious academic reader, and very interested in science, engineering, history and economics.

“He developed the technology for balloons that could fly in the jet streams above thirty thousand feet, and cross wide distances of ocean,” - a hitherto unequalled feat. One of these balloons was apparently the size of Canary Wharf. “In one case he landed in to the sea between Ireland and Scotland, and in the other he landed in the arctic of northern Canada.

Such record-breaking was shrewd in terms of publicity and would open the path to space. “We built a plane that a friend of Sir Richard’s, Steve Fosset, called the Virgin Galactic Global Flier. Fosset flew around the world in it on a single pint of fuel in 2004. It was that plane which lead us into the space project”.  The new aeroplane was composed of carbon composite structures, the key to its lightweight durability. Any atom of a given elemental type has a number of ‘hooks’ that allow it to bond with others, but only carbon has four hooks and combine with itself. This provides extreme flexibility and durability.

“These were the materials that could provide the breakthrough, at much lower cost, much lower environmental impact than large, ground-based rockets.” Originally intended as a cheaper and more durable way to launch communication satellites, Whitehorn and Branson soon realized the potential for space tourism. Virgin Galactic now boasts $10 million in deposits, five hundred bookings in total. “They’re starting to get the science customers as well, Whitehorn adds. “They’ve got a contract with NASA for sub-orbital space science, and the science research institute of Texas.”

There’s the question of how a private company can manage in a government dominated field. The first railway lines built across the United Sites were built by the government, causing serious trouble to the private companies that came later, a problem that the free market in the UK did not encounter. Whitehorn disagrees, referring to the governmental shuttles he says that the difference between them and Virgin Galactic’s generation of spacecraft is ‘the difference between crossing the Atlantic in a liner and crossing it in an airplane.’ It’s a strong claim to make, but looking at the sleek design of Virgin’s craft compared with the clunky shapes known to us all, I find myself half-convinced. Moreover, it’s not all image; the designs do not require the damaging reentry strategy, the new materials do not distort as aluminum does, and the launching platform, another plane in mid-air, does not have the risk of ground-based launches.

More outré ventures into space will have to wait, however. Moon bases and the colonization of Mars have little commercial viability in the short term, whatever political capital they might have. Gingrich is not alone in speculating though; Capitalism Magazine, an ezine devoted to radical capitalism, ran a piece advocating the selling of Mars to private interests as a spur to exploration and colonization.

That’s probably a little far from most people’s sense of the reasonable, but there are commercial opportunities in space.

“Solar power: if it could be done in orbit and microwaved down to earth, could be very, very efficient,” Whitehorn suggests, implying an alternative route for exploration. The moon, it seems, may also be a valuable commodity after all. He notes that it is rich in Helium-3 a possible fuel for fusion reactions. It makes the comparison between government-owned railways and private firms all the more relevant. A shuttle service owned by any one company could signify a monopoly if the day comes when the element is mined and transported.

That makes me sit up; very often, revolutionary change is brought about not by completely new technology, but established technology raised to a new scale. As the interview concludes, I have my doubts. I can’t help thinking though, if there is any future for human space exploration, it lies here.