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Aug. 12, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
59:10
Edition 217 - Civilian Space Flight Special

We meet the Founder of XCOR Michiel Mol in Amsterdam - he aims to be first to start civilianspace flights...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your great communications and also the donations that you're sending into The Unexplained.
I know that I've been saying over the last couple of shows that I'm going to do some shout-outs imminently, and it was supposed to be on this show, but it just turns out that this edition is going to be a special one.
And it's the kind of show that you do that you want to get it out as quickly as possible.
So, what I might do now is collate a lot of your emails and answer a lot of your points in a special edition.
You know, like that edition we did with Heather Cooper, The Astronomer, which was what a 15-minute special we put out there.
I might actually do a shout-out special just dealing with some of your issues in a future edition.
But just to say thank you very much for all of the feedback.
The last two shows generally enjoyed, controversial in some ways.
Tim Swartz, a lot of you loved him.
Some of you thought, I'm not entirely sure about his take on Morgellen's disease.
People wanting me to get doctors and qualified scientists on here about that.
Well, I take your point about that.
June Lundgren, still email coming in about her.
Some people thinking that it was good to hear somebody say those things.
This is the psychic medium June Lundgren, the one who battles demons, she says.
And some of you saying, what have you got a person like that on your show for?
So I think that is all just part of the game, really.
That's just part of what we do here.
The fact is that some of the people you're going to love and some of the people you're not.
You can please some of the people some of the time and you can't please all of the people all of the time.
I guess the aim of it all is to try and expand our minds as far as we can.
We're not going to agree with everything that everybody says.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work on the show.
Adam is constantly engaged keeping this ticking over and keeping it curated.
Thank you, Adam.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune.
It's been a long time since you've been in touch, Martin.
Please, if you can, drop me an email.
It would be nice to know that everything's okay with you.
But guest on this edition is somebody I've been meaning to talk to for a long time.
His name is Michael Moll.
I'm sure I haven't pronounced that right, but we'll check it with him.
He's in Amsterdam, Holland, and he is the man behind an ambitious project for regular space flight.
You may have heard of X-Corps.
That's the organization.
A lot of people have signed up and paid there.
I think it's something like $100,000 for a flight into space and the view to enjoy up there.
He's behind all of that.
And the project is, if the publicity material is to be believed, at a very advanced stage.
So we're going to talk with Michael Moll in Amsterdam very, very soon here at The Unexplained.
And we'll try and get an update on this.
Among the people who've signed up to be part of this project is Bob Geldof.
You know, the more you know the people, the more you've become engaged with it and involved with it, and you want it to work and you want it to work quickly because you want to get there yourself.
No question, Big.
No question, it's pioneer stuff.
And that little bit of recording is from a publicity video that XCOR put out.
Just thought you might want to hear a little bit of Sir Bob talking about how he is captivated by this project.
If you want to get in touch with me, go to the website theunexplained.tv.
That's where you can send me an email or make a donation to the show.
It'd be nice to hear from you.
All right, let's cross to Amsterdam now and talk about XCOR, the Space Project, and the Spacecraft Links with the boss of it, Michael Moll.
Michael, thank you very much indeed for making time for me.
Well, it's a pleasure being in your show, sir.
Well, that's great because a worldwide audience is going to hear you speak here, and I know you're used to doing that anyway.
But we have many, many listeners in the United States and Canada and across Europe.
So, you know, a lot of people who perhaps have not got the message yet, hopefully by the end of this, they'll get the message.
Now, I want to talk about you first of all, because as a journalist, I've done a little bit of research, a little bit of reading as you do, not too much, but your background is business.
Did you not run a Formula One racing team at one time?
Yeah, yeah.
Actually, I'm still a co-owner and board member of the Force India Formula One team.
It's the old team that the old Jordan Grand Prix team, which, well, in the end, ended up in my hands together with Dr. PJ Malia from India.
My background, though, is more computer science and computer games.
I studied math and computer science and then went on starting businesses in the internet industry, a company called Lost Boys International, LBI, and a games company called Guerrilla Games, which produced games for Sony PlayStation.
Then indeed my adventure into Formula One and now I'm all about the new space, the commercial space industry.
And people sometimes ask me, well, those things seem so different, but to me, there's one thing that really tied them together, and that's innovation.
And I have an enormous drive for innovation.
I love anything that's new and innovative.
Yep, and the impression that I get of you, not only are you very accomplished from what I've read and what you've just said, but you've also rather enjoyed, it seems to me, in these years on this earth that you've had, you've enjoyed being a bit of a pioneer, going into things first.
Yeah, yeah, that is innovation and pioneering even better.
To me, there's creativity needed in every aspect.
Creativity is not only in making a beautiful design or writing a good tagline.
It's also everywhere.
When you talk pioneering, whether you're a rocket scientist or a computer programmer or a games developer, this pioneering feeling needs creativity.
And that's, I think, what drives me most.
You told a lovely story on a presentation that you gave that I watched on YouTube today about how you became interested in space.
And it is very like an awful lot of us, you know, as small boys, certainly in the era that you and I were brought up in, space was captivating because we were just beginning to discover it.
But your journey was rather nice, the way that you told it.
Can you tell that story?
Yeah, I was born in 69, just two weeks after the first man on the moon.
And as a young kid, to me, it seems only logical that in my life I would go to space.
I dreamt about going to space, and everything about space fascinated me, and still does.
Not only human space travel, but also the vastness of the universe, the Big Bang theory, everything is so exciting.
And as a young boy, I was so excited that I made my own telescope out of a carton and some lenses I bought just because I wanted to see the rings of Saturn in my own eyes.
And at the very first moment, I used that telescope and looked at the sky and saw Saturn.
It really was just something I will really never forget.
It was amazing.
For other people, for me and people that I know, space was something that we were captivated and fascinated by, but we knew that we would never really in our lifetimes probably be able to go there and probably would not be able to be involved in the space race.
That's where you and I are different, isn't it?
Yeah, I don't know exactly.
It's probably in my DNA, but as a young kid, I think I was age 10 or 11 or something, and I already told my friends and parents and everybody wanted to hear that I would go to space in my life.
And all started laughing at me.
And indeed, I never became an official astronaut trainee or never even tried to.
But somehow, back then already, I had the feeling that this would happen.
Because for me, already back then, it seems so logical that we all would go to space in 20, 30 years from then.
And it tends to take a bit longer, those things usually do.
But I still think that by the end of the century, we'll have easy space.
People flying all over low-cost from A to B through space.
I think some people, those who don't understand the technicalities of the thing, those who only understand what they read in the papers, some people may be surprised that we're not actually doing commercial space travel yet.
Why we weren't doing it 20 or 30 years ago.
Yeah, it is something that is, well, it's not for nothing that they say it's like rocket science.
Rocket science, it is really hard.
And if you imagine it, in the past 50 or so years, only a little over 500 people went to space ever.
So in all humanity and mankind and all the centuries we've been dreaming about it, so far only 500 people made it.
And I think what really at XCOR is the game changer that will make space accessible for everybody is our propulsion technology.
So our rocket engine.
It's the first rocket engine in the world that is really capable of taking people to space four times a day.
It's fully reusable.
It runs on almost standard jet fuel and it has a lifetime of over 5,000 flights.
For a car or a plane, that might seem normal.
But in the space industry so far, and that's what makes it so extremely expensive.
How can you be sure that it is that durable, Michael?
How can you be absolutely sure of that?
We've tested it for thousands and thousands of rocket firings on the ground already.
And we've built two small aircraft with that rocket engine and have flown 66 missions with it already.
So it's been tested in the air a bit, but on the ground for thousands of times and without any visible wear.
So it can go on almost forever.
Of course, it needs maintenance like a car engine or a jet engine.
But I think this technology, the fully reusability of a rocket engine, is what will, I don't really like the word, but that's really a game changer in the industry.
And you've seen the same in history with the invention of the piston engine.
At that moment, suddenly there was a boost in car development.
And then only when the jet engine was developed, the airlines industry started really evolving rapidly.
And now with this engine we have, it's time for next generation to happen.
And I think in the past decades, we have been waiting for a reusable engine, which simply was not possible yet.
I presume that even this far, the project has eaten money.
It must have cost a fortune.
Yeah, of course, it's something we've been working on this for over a decade now.
And since we were selling tickets to space for 100,000 US dollars, we've sold over 300 tickets now, so that generates some income.
But you're totally right.
A project like this is expensive and it consumes a lot of time and money, but we're doing it in a very, very efficient way.
So it's not for nothing that NASA is trying to outsource a lot of things, because if you are too big with the government, bureaucracy, etc., things tend to become 10 times or 100 times as expensive.
So I cannot tell you exact numbers, but for us you're talking tens of millions of dollars, not hundreds, let alone billions.
And do you have people who are like benefactors to you?
I see that you've got some commercial partners, certainly from your website.
They include KLM, Heineken, Unilever, and of course the Great Electronics Corporation in Holland, Philips.
So are they helping you with money?
Yes, they help us with money by doing two things or three things.
They see our passion for innovation and that of course their brands can benefit from that and all for different reasons.
For KLM, for instance, it was almost a century ago when they started doing round trips above Amsterdam.
And out of that, the whole airline industry evolved.
So they see the same happening in the spaceline industry in the future.
And they want to be part of that.
And they support us by sponsoring us, buying tickets to space, and helping us in joint marketing efforts to get our brand known.
For Unilever, for instance, maybe you've seen the X, I think it's called Lynx in the UK, the X or Lynx campaign, where they thought, well, as an 18-year-old boy, what is by far the coolest thing you can be, and that's an astronaut.
So then they said, well, nothing beats an astronaut.
And over 2 million people globally subscribed to a contest where in the end, they took 120 people to space camp in the Kennedy Space Center for three days.
And out of the 25 winners were selected, who will go to space with us as soon as we're flying.
A lot of it will depend on you, though.
You're a very persuasive guy.
Just watching that video of you making a presentation, you put a very powerful case across.
Now, to get people to put money into you and to not regard you as a crazy man, that's a big deal.
And that's a skill that you have, isn't it?
Well, I don't like to brag at all.
It's not something I do on purpose.
It's the way I am.
I'm really passionate about this.
And I truly believe this is possible and will happen and will change the future.
And I'm really proud to be able to be part of it.
As a boy, I was telling you, I had a dream to go to space.
I knew that would happen someday.
And of course it will happen.
But to be part of a company that will make that possible for everybody is something that's even beyond my wildest dreams.
Were you deterred at all?
Were you disappointed, upset at all, when you read about what happened to Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic test fight recently?
Of course the thing blew up, didn't it?
And I think the co-pilot was seriously injured and the pilot was killed, isn't that right?
Yeah, the other way around.
But this industry is still in its infancy.
It's really small.
And XCOR is based in the Mojave Desert near Los Angeles.
And Skilled Composites, the company was building a spaceship for Branson, is really next door to our factory.
So it's a small world, so we knew each other, we had lunch in the same restaurants, and it's really like one big family still.
So when something like this happens, of course, it's a big blow.
It's terrible that it happened.
It was a test flight, and things do happen, but it was an enormous shock for the industry, of course.
Absolutely.
And the kind of thing that, you know, Richard Branson is indefatigable.
He will go on.
But as you say, it's a body blow for all of you, even if it wasn't your project that was affected at the moment, because it's all in its infancy.
You're a big family, aren't you?
Yeah, yeah.
It's really like that.
Although our two companies are totally separate, even technology is totally incomparable.
It doesn't mean that we know each other, talk to each other.
And in effect, I am one of the very early few that have bought a ticket at Scroaching Galactic, I think, nine years ago now.
Right, and you're still planning to go with Richard Branson?
Of course, yes, yes.
But by now, it's not only a wish to go to space once, but I think I've got a huge opportunity to see it more often in different ways.
Are you in a race with Richard Branson?
A race, you said?
Yeah.
Well, now, no, not really.
We both have our own programs.
Safety, of course, is by far most important.
Then there are all sorts of rules, regulations, even enhance safety.
Mainly the FAA, the U.S. government body who checks not only the airline industry, but also the space industry.
We are ready when we're ready, and they are ready when they are ready.
That being said, of course, both of us would love to be first, yes.
That is the question, isn't it?
When are you ready?
When are we going to see this fly?
Yeah, it's really difficult.
Now we're getting closer and closer to finished links, a finished spaceship.
Our goal is to start test flying early next year.
And test flying for us is because we are a small spaceship that takes off under its own power from a normal runway.
Test flying is immediately a rocket-powered test flight, not a space at the first flight, or the first couple of flights, of course.
But so the first test flight, that will be early next year, and that's, of course, a major milestone for us.
And then depending on the test program, we envision six to nine months later, we'll be ready for the first commercial flight.
And just thinking of it from your point of view, almost in a way, I guess, Michael, that it's almost better that you do this with minimal publicity.
Do you intend to invite the media to see the test flights, or are you going to do this quietly?
Well, what we'll definitely do, but that's probably before the end of the year, is what we call the rollout event.
That there will first publicly show the Finnish spaceship to the world.
And of course, all press is invited then.
All our 300 future astronauts are invited, our commercial partners, everybody.
So it will be a big thing.
With a test flight, it's something that's really difficult to predict.
Weather, last moment, small changes.
So it's impossible to invite people two weeks before to a test flight because you never know when it will happen exactly.
So that is reason enough that we will focus on the rollout as a big event.
And then the test, of course, we will at the last minute invite some friends and media and of course film it ourselves to make it public as soon as possible.
We're not hiding anything, but basically it's impossible to predict exactly when we will test.
We will go when we're ready.
And when we're ready, we're not going to wait another week because only then the press will arrive or something.
But that's also another Factor and facet of the press being involved, isn't it?
Once you announce that you're going to do something to the press and you give them a bit of a time scale for it, they will then put unspoken pressure on you to make it happen, and that is when mistakes happen, isn't it?
You've only got to look at the history of NASA.
For us, it's impossible not to give some sort of accident because everybody, also our clients, everybody, they keep on asking when, when, when, when.
That's the question, of course.
But that will never ever change their mind about safety and how we take a step-by-step approach towards readiness for flight.
So it does happen sometimes, regretfully, that we have to inform all participants and present everybody that things have slipped a bit.
And sometimes rare, in a rare occasion, sometimes it's a bit faster than we expected.
But a lot of times, indeed, it takes a couple of months longer than expected.
And you might have partly answered this at the beginning of our conversation, but I just wanted to make it absolutely clear.
You were saying that quite often the private imperative, the private involvement, private investment is a better driver than a big public project.
So I suppose, in a roundabout way, what I'm asking is, how have you managed to be seemingly so far ahead of NASA when you're a smaller organization?
Well, maybe being a small organization is one of the reasons to be able to be where we are.
And NASA is doing fantastic things, of course, but different things.
And this fully reusable engine, that's something that has been on the table for a long, long time.
And some of our people, the best skilled people we have in our company, come from NASA and others come from Boeing, from all different industries.
But they have tens of years of experience in creating rocket engines.
And it is one big genius idea of creating the first fully reusable engine.
And I cannot reiterate that enough, but it's something that will really change the way we'll fly in the future forever.
How important was commercial secrecy to you when developing this thing?
Because if you lost that technology to the Chinese or the Koreans or some other nation, it would be a disaster, wouldn't it?
Yeah, that's something that's for me especially very strange being a board member, the largest shareholder, being really involved in this project.
But I'm not a US citizen.
I don't have a green card, no US password.
So with the ITA regulations in the U.S., a lot of things that are happening, I'm not allowed to know the details.
So about 50% of the factory is a no-go area for me.
And that's exciting on one hand, but very strange at the other end.
And the same way you just mentioned China, till about a year and a half ago, you're not allowed to sell tickets to space to Chinese people because the flight is only an hour.
But the U.S. government is still afraid that when we would allow a Chinese person to step into the links, fight for an hour and get out, to somehow walk away with technology.
And luckily, that has changed because you can imagine that China is quite an important market for us.
I would imagine that's quite heartening that those restrictions were placed on you because it shows that the American government is taking you seriously.
They believe you're going to do this.
That's also the beauty of it.
And I've said it before in other interviews.
I've been innovation and pioneering in the internet industry, in the games industry, and of course a lot of innovation in Formula One.
But now with the space industry, I think every entrepreneur, when you run a business, things come across that you've never experienced before.
But now with us, with the space industry, almost weekly or monthly at least, we come across issues that not only we, that nobody ever has experienced, have experienced.
So that is such a strange and fantastic feeling.
It's not only technology, it's also, for instance, medical.
What should be the medical procedures for somebody who goes to space?
Because till now, all astronauts, all 530 or so of them, are like supermen.
They all are former fighter pilots, they all are very skilled, trained, etc., etc.
Well, we would like to take this granddad of 84 to space or a little girl of 18 so that medical is something exciting.
Same for training.
What kind of space training do you need before you go to space?
All of that is non-existent.
And then rules and regulations.
If we would export a link from the US to Europe, for instance, we would love to fly from the UK.
And we also have the Dutch small island called Curaçao, which also would like to build a spaceport.
And how does it work?
Whose responsibility is it?
All those things have never been done before.
And that makes this project so complex and so exciting at the same time.
Have you ever thought about this, that the space technology that we've had up to now has been very largely controlled by the Americans, the Russians, and to some extent the Chinese.
And they've wanted to keep it between themselves.
I know the Indians are involved now, and the Japanese have done some space work as well, and so have we here in Europe.
But by and large, those three big players were the ones who controlled the entire ballpark.
Now, another big player, or somebody who may become a big player, that's you, is coming in here.
Are you concerned that there may be powers or forces or people somewhere on this earth who will not want you to succeed?
Because once you let that genie out of the bottle, that genie's out of the bottle?
Good question.
I'm not worried about that yet.
For me, it's something we are confident that we'll make this happen.
We know to the rest of the world, to the professional world, government, but also, of course, the big corporates, the Googles of this world, who almost have taken over the role of the government in innovation and pioneering.
I think they're all waiting for us to prove what we're doing.
And when we've had our first few test flights and we have proven that this rocket is really fully reusable and capable of what we were saying it is, I think then there will be an enormous amount of interest from all sides.
And I don't think it will be a negative thing.
And I don't think people will start and stop us.
If, for instance, the Boeings of this world will think, well, maybe we become a competitor.
Those companies are so big, they would then probably rather buy us than then fight us.
True enough.
Google, of course, this week has only just announced that it wants to split itself into various parts so that there will be the part that handles your data and then other parts that do other things like build cars.
Would you ever consider either going into partnership with or selling out to, say, Google?
Well, consider, definitely.
I think with a good strong partner like a Google or a Boeing that can help us forward ideally then, but I never know how things work out.
Ideally, I would say let's start to have them a minority stake so that we can do our own thing, be like the skunk works, the special projects, the space projects part of such a big organization without being taken over completely because then I'm afraid that we'll go in the bureaucracy of those big multinationals.
So partnering yet, please, but preferably starting with the minority sector.
Do you see yourself being in charge of this once you've got it up and going, once you've had your space flight, once the company's turning over and it's all happening, do you want to step away from it and do something else or will you stay with this?
Well, I've learned from experience that I'm most useful for a company when it's in its early dynamic stages.
I'm not a manager that likes to manage a stable situation.
I'm not good at that.
I like when things are changing very rapidly, when there's a lot of dynamics going on, and then to get a small team of people to perform above standard, that is something that I really like.
So by the time we're flying four times a day, I've had my space flight, when it becomes a more normal company, I think it's time for me to move on.
Maybe not as a board member or shareholder, but as somebody who's involved on a daily basis, I think at that time for me, it's a good time to move on.
Have you had a chance, an opportunity to talk with any of the Apollo guys?
I say that because I interviewed Edgar Mitchell, and sadly, Neil Armstrong is not with us anymore.
But I wonder if you had a chance to get their take on all of this.
Yeah, I'm very proud, and I feel lucky to be here to met Neil Armstrong a couple of times and discuss this with him.
And Buzz Aldrin even more.
So Buzz Aldrin is on our advisory board.
So we talked with Buzz a lot about commercial space travel.
And yeah, he's clearly a fan of us.
And does he believe that in the future, space travel will be what we all dreamt it would be when we were kids in the 60s and 70s?
That it will be commonplace in the future.
Yes, yeah.
We believe that there's a place for mankind outside the Earth.
And especially Burs would love to see people inhabit Mars as soon as possible.
And I'm glad you said that, because you talk on one of those videos that I've seen about the ecological importance of this.
What exactly will that be?
How will that help this planet?
Well, I think we as a company, well, not as a company, but I believe that mankind is always curious, always wants to explore things, and therefore always wants to grow and get more and more.
And this earth simply, at a certain moment, cannot grow anymore.
We can grow our crops more efficiently for a number of years, but in the end, there is a stop to it.
And the only way to keep on growing as human beings is to find places out of this world.
Right.
So Lynx is going to be much more than just joyrides up into space for people who can afford to go there.
Oh, definitely.
the joyride is only the very very first step and all these first links this is suborbital flight into space and back to And of course, and a hell of a variety as well, of course.
But it's the first technology demonstrator for us that goes to the next step, what we call the orbiter, where we can take people, payloads, satellites, into science projects into orbit, dock at ISS or future hotels in space.
And then the next phase, of course, is going even further to the moon than Mars or wherever.
You talk to me about having to blaze a trail, really, in training people, having to learn all of those things about how do you train people to go into space?
How do you prepare them?
do you have to do?
So talk to me about the preparations that you've made for Great guy, yeah.
How are you training Bob Geldof for this?
Yeah, so what we've done is when people go on a space flight with us, there are a lot of things that will be a first for them.
Being in a cockpit, Wearing a pressure suit, going at 3,000 miles an hour, breaking the sound barrier, having G-force up to 4G, so four times your own body weight, being weightless, so zero G. All those things are things that normal people never experience.
And we want, by the time that they go to space, we want them to enjoy being in space.
And what all the astronauts I've talked to say is simply all those aspects are great, but the one thing that really is life-changing is the view from space on Earth.
So you, with your pilot, the two of you being up there in the blackness of space, looking down at the Earth with 7 billion people, that apparently, and I can very well imagine, but I have not been there yet, is a life-changing experience.
All the other stuff we can train people for, not that experience.
So we'd rather train them for that.
And how we do that by training missions.
One of them is, or two of them are high G missions, so where we take people on a small fighter jet, which can fly the same flight envelope, flight profile as the links, but of course not at the same speed or altitude.
It can give you 4Gs, it can give you 0G, you're in a cockpit wearing a suit and a helmet.
So that's a good preparation.
We also have a G-Force simulator, like it's called Destemoner in the Netherlands.
It's a big centrifuge where you're in the cockpit, the virtual cockpit, and you experience the same flight, but then with the G-Forces along with that.
And then we've also partnered here with companies who do zero-G experiences.
And then they take you in an Airbus or Boeing, which they completely strip from the inside.
Right, but the Vomit Comet, yeah?
The Vomit Comet, exactly.
And that can give you, by doing a parabolic flight, it can give you, I think, 22, 23 seconds of wavelessness, but then 10, 15 times in a row, which is great.
Like I said, the Vomit Comet.
It's the continuous change between 0G and 2G that most people cannot handle after a while.
Have you done this, Michael?
Yeah, I've done all trainings a number of times.
It's not going to space, but those are experiences that are fantastic by themselves.
It's a really great day.
You get, of course, a medical screening first on such a day, then some theory behind it, and then some preparation, then the flight or training itself.
And then, of course, then there's an award ceremony.
And we do that with a group of people.
We've got 300 people that have bought a ticket now.
And they're all very different.
They're really that 18-year-old girl, that 84-year-old granddad.
And everything in between, they come from over 50 countries, all different backgrounds, but they share one thing, and that's a passion for going to space.
And when you bring them together for training missions, or last June, we had a hangar visit in Mojave where 45 of them came together to show the progress on Mobile Links and where we are.
It is really, yeah, it feels magical somehow.
And what happens if somebody comes to you and maybe they're 78 years of age or 82 and their health is not fantastic, but they've got the money?
Are you going to take their money or are you going to say you're too old and too unfit for this?
No, I had a procedure that worked in...
When people, somebody wants to buy a ticket to space, within a week or two, maximum, they'll have a medical screening.
And if it turns out they're not fit to fly, then we just reimburse the money and then we say, I'm very sorry, we cannot take you.
So far, though, out of more than 300 people, only two were not able to fly.
That's good.
Because, like you said, I always thought that you had to be Superman to do this.
So there's hope for me, it seems.
there's hope for everybody I'm not a doctor so it's a bit difficult to But what I've seen from experience is that if you do not have a serious heart condition and you're not pregnant, then you're good to go.
Okay.
Well, I'm going to think about it.
I've got to raise the money first, but I'll definitely think about it.
Are you frustrated in a way that you are so advanced from what you tell me in this project, and yet you're not on the front pages or even inside most of the newspapers most of the time?
Are you frustrated that you're not getting more coverage than you're getting?
No, not at all.
And I think for us, the position we're in now, for now, it's okay.
And I'm more than confident that when we do a successful test flight, and especially if it were a first commercial flight, we'll be on the 8 o'clock news globally.
So in the future, everybody will know us.
And we're getting better known every single day.
But it's not our goal to be famous as a company, let alone a person.
That's not my goal at all.
I want to make this happen, to change the way we travel forever.
And if we do that, people will know us.
The pictures on your website show something that is very streamlined and very graceful from the pictures on your website.
Not at all like the space shuttle.
How did you get it like that?
You mean the looks of the links itself?
Yeah, I mean, the looks are very streamlined.
It all looks very...
It all...
It looks more like a jet plane.
It is.
And in the end, it is the computer simulations and the wind tunnel that made this shape to form.
And it's not for the first time that planes are built that do speeds like this.
So that is not the biggest issue.
The big issue has always been to get a really reusable rocket engine.
So it looks like, to me, more like more slick, small, more updated version of a space shuttle.
But it's something completely different, of course.
It looked to me like something that I don't know whether you were brought up on Thunderbirds, Captain Scarf at the Jerry Anderson programs, but it looked like something from a Jerry Anderson program.
Yeah, I can imagine.
It's a pure functional design.
And same with Formula One.
Somehow people, sometimes they're really ugly, but sometimes really people think a Formula One car is really beautiful.
But that's not the point, of course.
We're not creating a car or a spaceship to be pure from the outside.
It's all based on performance and then getting the best out of the airflow.
Just going off slightly on a slight tangent, I wonder, do you know Jamie Anderson, the son of the late Jerry Anderson?
Because I know that Jamie is producing new Thunderbird shows now.
I know that he's fascinated by all of this, and I'm sure he'd really be interested in your project if you haven't met him.
I haven't met him yet, so if you could introduce him to me, it would be great.
Drop him an email.
But he's a fascinating guy, and they're producing these new shows now.
The only reason I say this is that those programs and science fiction comics and all the rest of it are what fired the imaginations of boys like me and you, aren't they?
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
It is science fiction movies and comics and old TV series that started the imagination.
Now, four flights a day.
That's going to be a hell of a schedule, isn't it?
How soon after this thing begins to fly do you think you're going to be able to manage four flights a day?
And on how many reusable craft, would there just be one craft or would there be more?
Yeah, well, we'll start with one craft.
And it's with the former, the smaller aircraft where we put the rocket engine in, we've already tried it seven times on one day.
So we've shown the full usability already.
It's four times a day.
The flight itself takes only about an hour or so.
And because it runs on jet fuel, we do have to take our own liquid oxygen locks on board because in space there's no oxygen, so nothing will burn otherwise.
But it's really, when we land the spaceship, it's like an airplane.
We check it quickly, refuel with jet fuel and locks, and go again.
When you take your own liquid oxygen up there to help this fuel burn, is that not a flying bomb that you've got?
Well, it's, of course, oxygen is a strange material, but jet fuel is not really an explosive material at all.
And so by choosing jet fuel and oxygen, it's a far safer solution of doing this.
And then just in case, in all thousands of test firings, we have never experienced this.
The rocket engine has got some sort of shield around it.
There are four rocket engines.
Should one of four have an issue, the others and the spaceship itself are well protected.
You're clearly very, very excited about this, and you have every right to be.
What do you say?
You know, the world is full of skeptics.
I'm one of these people.
I see possibilities.
But I know people who don't see possibilities, they just see problems.
What do you say to people who say he's never going to do this?
Yeah, to me, it's something that I feel we still have to prove this.
We've, like I said, done thousands of test firings.
We've got 66 flights in the air with the rocket engine.
We're nearly there for the rollout, showing the real spaceship.
We'll start flying early next year.
So people are really skeptical.
Let's talk to them a year or two from now when we're doing this on a daily basis, and then we'll see you again.
So truly 16 is going to be your year.
It'll be a very, really exciting year for us, yes.
Thank you for answering all of these questions.
If you don't mind, I've got a couple more, but I promise not to keep you too much longer because I know your time is valuable, Michael.
No worries.
It's a pleasure.
Okay.
Well, that's good of you.
Re-entry was always a problem with the space shuttle, the tiles that protected the underside of the space shuttle for re-entry.
How have you got around that problem?
Yeah, well, there's quite a fundamental difference between the trajectory of the space shuttle and the lynx.
The space shuttle really goes orbital, and to go orbital, so orbiting the Earth, you need to have a speed of about Mach 24, so 24 times the speed of sound, which is actually roughly 24,000 kilometers an hour, so in miles that's probably 17,000, 18,000.
We only, because we've got sub-orbital, come to about a sixth of that speed.
So it's still the fastest thing on Earth, but a lot slower than the space shuttle used to go.
And so when we re-enter the atmosphere, the nose cone of the links will heat up a little bit, but not more than 600 to 700 degrees Celsius, which is something that titanium or even normal iron, that's something that's not an issue at all.
The space shuttle, when it re-entered, heated up to about 2,000 to 3,000 degrees, which is a lot more difficult to deal with.
But that being said, nowadays, we've got way different materials.
We would take a totally different approach to the space shuttle heating issue.
Of course, that was something that has invented in the 60s and early 70s.
And by now, we've got materials that are far better able to protect us from heat.
And to be able to do those maneuvers, I'm guessing that not just any pilot can do this.
This is something that you have to be particularly adept at doing.
You've got good people to pilot these.
Yes, yeah.
We've got a number of test pilots.
Rick Sievers, for instance, who has flown the space shuttle three times, one time as commander, so he has been there three times already.
Uh but all our pilots uh are former fighter pilots, they have years of test school, they have flown in thousands of hours in multiple different uh aircraft and all and test aircraft.
And yeah, it's maybe a bit strange to say, but we only will take people that have that experience, but to them flying the links is a piece of cake.
How so?
Because it's it's it's a single purpose vehicle.
You know exactly what to do, you know the circumstances, you know what will happen.
And when you're an F-16 fighter pilot, you not only have to fly the thing, you meanwhile you have to take care of enemies, of all sorts of other things in a far more dynamic and uncertain environment.
And for test pilot, the uncertainty is something they've been trained for, and for all fighter pilots.
But at the links, it's basically the same flight every time.
Crazy question, but people will ask it.
There is a lot of stuff on the internet that you can read, and I'm sure a lot of it is complete garbage.
But some of it talks about things that space shuttle pilots have seen and people on the International Space Station have allegedly seen that have not been from this planet.
If one of your flights was to encounter something that was anomalous and potentially not from here, would you keep a media clamp on it or would you go immediately and tell the public, tell the world?
Yeah, well, first of all, the chances for that to happen are extremely slim, of course.
I firmly believe there's more out there than just is in the universe.
If you look at all the billions multiplied by billions of planets in the universe, it would be very strange to think that we were the only ones with life on it.
But on the other hand, if something like that would happen, I think it would be fantastic.
So we would make that public immediately.
And is that something that you must have contingencies, media contingencies, for every eventuality, an accident or whatever?
Are you prepared for that?
Because who knows, it might happen.
No, no, we have indeed contingencies for a lot of things that can happen, but not for extraterrestrial alien encounters.
No, if that happens, then we'll take it.
We'll see what happens.
But that's something we do not plan for.
You're at the frontiers of technology here.
It is amazing stuff that you're doing.
Space has a price.
Traditionally, it has.
The crew of Apollo 7, wasn't it, died on the launch pad.
The shuttle, of course, has had its own difficulties.
And even Richard Branson in test has had problems.
You must be prepared, although it is great technology in its cutting edge, and you're sure that most things are going to go right, you must mentally be prepared for the times when they're going to go wrong.
Yeah, it's terrible, but we have to.
It's something, like I said, safety is on everybody's mind every single day with everything we do.
But like the Allen industry, there's always the very slightest slim possibility that something terrible happens.
And what do you say to your voyagers about the risk?
What do you say to the people who've paid the money and are going to go with you?
What do you tell them about that?
The only thing we can do is be as open as possible, tell them exactly what we do and what we do about safety and what the risks are.
And they have to, the FAA has a waiver of the informal consent document they have to sign, which explains every incident that the space industry has had in all of its 50, 60 years of history now.
So they know what they're getting into.
And how have your dealings with the insurance industry been?
Is it costing you a fortune to insure this project?
No, that went amazingly well, I must say.
We've been able to get good assurance for all our participants.
We're in the middle of August now, heading towards the middle of August.
Everything's going to happen for you, you say, in 2016.
As we speak right now, me in London, you in Amsterdam, where are you with this project?
What's the next piece of news we'll read?
I think the next piece will be that the Lynx is standing on its own gear, so three standing, and then basically the only piece still missing are the wings, which we expect to come in in the months to come.
But to have for the first time the spaceship on its own landing gear rolling around in our hangar is our next big milestone.
What do you say to people who say money of this order?
People have a right to spend their money as they wish.
But what would you say to those people who I'm sure they've said it already?
That this is all very nice, but really you need to be spending money like this to ease the poverty in Africa and to help people down here on Earth, not to allow a few people to go and enjoy the view?
Yeah, the two things, like I said, to enjoy the view is first only technology demonstrator.
If in the future we can use the technology for what we really want, this is to bring satellites to space at a way lower cost, to do A to B, so point-to-point travel at only a way higher speed, but also a lot less environmentally damaging, then a lot of good will come from that.
The satellites alone, if we can have local satellites in orbit that's not possible Today, that will have a huge impact on a lot of things, including climate and hunger and other things on Earth.
So, you're saying that this will facilitate easier satellite technology?
That's one of our main drivers.
Well, that has the potential then, I presume, to, you know, those places that I know in Africa that are so isolated and people have so little, it's a chance to bring communications and some of the benefits of this modern civilization of ours to them.
Yeah, that is a good example.
And a decade from now, we'll all have low-cost, high-speed internet via satellite from any point in the world.
I know nothing about you personally, Michael.
Are you a married man?
Do you have children?
I have four children.
Actually, my youngest daughter is just 10 weeks old now.
10 weeks.
I have some sleepless nights now and then.
And I was married once before, but I've got a girlfriend now for about five years.
And I'm really, really man.
You have every reason to be by the sounds of it.
You're 10-week old.
When she's old enough to understand, what will you tell her about what you do, and will you encourage her to go into space?
Well, I don't think I have to encourage her.
I think by the time she's in her teens, it will be quite normal that people go to space.
And I will just, by the time she's interested, tell her what I've done in the past and why I did it.
And it's back to the beginning.
It's all out of a passion for innovation and pioneering and making a change in the world.
You said that you will always want to be involved in this, in XCOR, and what it does, but you might want to change your role and maybe move away from the day-to-day stuff once it's all up and running.
What does a man who's done that do next?
Robotics.
Oh, really?
Robotics and deep learning, intelligent computers.
And I loved creating robots, so robots all my life and doing artificial intelligence stuff.
And I think that that also will be something that will change the world forever.
But first things first, let's focus on space trail for the years to come.
And what did you think when you read, just finally, what did you think when you read about a month or so ago in the media, maybe two months, about a robot that appeared to be aware of itself for the first time?
Where does that mean?
Nice marketing story.
You're skeptical.
I'm not skeptical that it's I'm logical, that there will be a moment that we're already able to just copy the brain of an ant, for instance, and then that copy in the computer will have the same reaction as an ant will have, and we don't call it that intelligent.
But by the time we're able to do that with a cat or a dog, things change.
And eventually, the computer power will be so big that we can just make a copy of our own brain.
And is that an intelligent thing?
Probably it is, but it almost, of course, a philosophical thing as well.
So I think it's extremely exciting.
You've been very good to stay on this long.
I'll ask this as my last question.
You talked about computing, of course.
You've been heavily involved in computers and computer games and that kind of thing.
The first moon craft, the Lunar Lander, had, I think, the computing power of something like a little Casio calculator.
What sort of computing power does the Lynx have?
It has a state-of-the-art computing power, but like a modern jet, but it has a lot of power, of course, but it's not that it's needed more computer power.
By now, computers are so powerful that you don't need a really expensive computer to do what you need to do on a links.
Back then, in 69, I remember one of the big stories, a great stories, that the guys that went to the moon had to do math courses to be able to calculate things by head or on paper really quickly because they were going to the moon, but a calculator didn't exist yet.
Yeah, they had to have that level of skill, which was useful in the end when Apollo 13 had problems because they had a lot of calculation involved in that.
Will your people be qualified to that degree if they get themselves into a problem?
Presumably, they're going to be trained and ready to get themselves out of it.
Yeah, that's the whole thing about being a pilot, especially a test pilot.
You're basically only trained to do the right thing when things start going wrong.
Michael, thank you very much indeed.
I hope throughout this I've pronounced your name properly, by the way.
Everybody calls me Michael.
It's a Dutch name officially Michiel, but nobody can say that out of our life.
You know, we Brits, we want to do these things right, so it's Michiel Moll.
Yeah, sort of, yes, yes, very, very good.
Thank you.
Well, Michael, do me a favor, if you can, in amongst all this, can you ask your press people to keep in touch with me about this?
Because I would like to follow this.
And I have a keen and eager and growing audience around the world who would like to know more about this.
So thank you very much for giving me your time.
Thank you so much.
And of course I will.
And you'll get the insights revolved out event in due course.
I would love to be part of that.
Thank you very much indeed, Mikhail.
Thank you so much.
Take care, bye.
Bye-bye now.
Mikhail Michael Moll from Amsterdam, Holland on the fascinating XCOR project.
2016 is going to be a big year for them, so we'll follow their progress.
And Michael, Mikhail, has offered to keep me posted on all of this, so I will bring you developments as they happen.
Big deal for us to be able to get an Interview with this man and so much of his time.
So, thank you very much indeed to all the people at XCOR for making this happen.
More great shows in the pipeline.
Thank you very much for your support.
If you'd like to make a donation to the show or send me an email about it, go to the website theunexplained.tv, the website designed, created, maintained by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot.
There you can leave me a donation or you can send me an email, your guest suggestions, general thoughts about the show to keep me on track.
I love to hear from you and this show is growing all the time, which I'm really pleased about.
Until we meet again here on The Unexplained, my name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London and please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
Thank you.
Take care.
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