Virgin flight, rocket engines and a Moonbase

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0:58Hello, welcome to the May 2026 edition of Space Muffins. We're in partnership with the Naked Scientists and I remain Richard Hollingham. And I am still Sue Nelson. In a moment, we meet space traveller Trevor Beatty, one of the few people who's flown to space with Virgin Galactic. And it's a great unfiltered interview. We'll also discuss NASA's NASA's plans to establish a moon base and celebrate the RS-25, the engine that's going to help get astronauts there. They have given 126 safe rides to 97 different astronauts. So these are very experienced engines. Three of them are experienced. One of them is new.

1:44It'll be its first flight, which is kind of cool because it's the same way with the astronauts. Our first guest is described by Wikipedia as one of the leading figures in advertising in Britain. His campaigns included the memorable Hello Boys Wonder Bra campaign. I remember it well. I certainly remember that. I wore one, so it worked. You wore one? Yeah. I know. I know. I really don't need one. He's now a film producer. He produced the award-winning Moon. But we're talking to him because in 2023, he became the 667th human being to leave the planet, flying into space with Virgin Galactic. Hello to Trevor Beatty.

2:25Hello. Hello. Now, it was Dallas Campbell that mentioned you on the podcast in March. You feature in his excellent book. And it's fair to say, and he's a neighbour of yours, and it's fair to say you were obsessed with space as a child, which I suppose, I mean, a lot of us were. I was, I guess more than most, I think. But that's because I was a child of Apollo. And for me, it was a kind of transition between the world of Thunderbirds and Fireball XR5 to the real humans who ended up looking like puppets on the moon. And that transition happened really seamlessly. So for me, Steve Zodiac became Buzz Aldrin.

3:07Buzz Aldrin became a hero. I became Buzz Aldrin. So it was a seamless line through, really. It wasn't my obsession to go to space. It was my assumption that I would go. I didn't see my life as a kind of pyramid and one day I'll go to space. It's very much a straight line. One dog, I suppose, they're all carrying around doing interior decorating. That's so interesting for you to say that that's an assumption. I've never heard it described like that, but that was exactly my experience as well. Unlike you, I'm still waiting. But you're right, it was something about those TV programmes that I too remembered was that it was like, well, of course.

3:46And then later there were programmes like UFO, which had a moon base on it, again another Gerry Anderson production, was that, of course, of course we'll go. The debate was which aspect of space. So would you go to a space hotel? Would you go to the moon? Would you go to Mars? That was the only debate, really. Or a planet, like on Star Trek. Or a planet, yeah. Which aspect would you go? And it would all have started within my teenage years. So by the time I was 30, people would be living on Mars. But that really, that made sense when I was a kid. It wasn't exaggerated because the acceleration of progress was so incredible that you only had to project that at a similar angle to put everyone on Mars by the early 1980s.

4:32It just makes sense. It's just everything stalled after the moon. And just to come back to your childhood, we actually have the same Brook Bond picture card book. I couldn't find it. I've got it somewhere. Do you know Brian Cox? Brian Cox does as well. Oh, really? Yeah, Brian Cox featured, took my breath away. I had a chat with Brian recently, and in one of his Wons of the Universe episodes, he literally takes the book out and says, this is what started it for me. And I actually had two of them. I filled two books, and I cut one of them up to fill in my space race scrapbook projects, which ended up taking to space with me.

5:11But I'd literally cut up the Brooklyn cards and glued them in as part of my storytelling, as part of my projects. then I also have a separate pristine Brookbond. I was obsessed. I drank a lot of tea. I haven't drunk it since. I should just explain to people outside the UK because this does seem a bizarre thing when you think about it that if you bought Brookbond tea you got a little card in it and previously it had been cigarettes that had cards in them. You got a little card and you collected the cards and you'd swap them with your friends to get all the cards to fill in a book which you also sent off for.

5:45Yeah, I mean kids do it It's football, don't they? I'm never really a football fan. Kids are football. But for me, that's for telling my life story because that's called marketing. And so the marketing of space through the back of cornflakes packets or tea cards from Brookbund Tea is marketing. They were marketing space, which got me into both aspects. I couldn't have gone to space without a career in advertising, with marketing. Marketing took me to space. You obviously noticed it then and it was part of your career and a very successful one. The more successful you became, was the thought of space always at the back of your mind or was it a sort of, oh my goodness, I've done this well, I can do whatever I want?

6:30you know no no it was at the front of my mind

6:37so actually you know i had a career that went beyond briar ads you know if you look at a lot of the work that i produced you'll find that it was space biased whether it was an alien creature for playstation or producing the movie moon or um lads arriving on a planet for a carling commercial you don't have to look fast to see a space team running through my work so you say you had this at the front of your mind, at what point did you realise that it wasn't going to happen in, NASA wasn't going to take you to space. You weren't going to, it wasn't just going to happen. You would need to raise the funds to go to space.

7:13Was there a point where you thought, hang on, there's an opportunity here with Virgin Galactic or? Well, before that, well, two things in one, because I'm the world's biggest David Bowie fan. So again, that's not a surprise. And Bowie made a film with Nick Rogue called The Man Who Fell to Earth. Oh, yeah. Which is just a remarkable film. It's bonkers, it's silly, but at the same time, it's a very moving, very special film for me. And again, I saw it at a formative age. And Bowie plays an alien called Thomas Jerome Newton. He comes to Earth, and his sole aim is to raise funds to build a rocket to send himself back home.

7:51He doesn't want to invade Earth. He doesn't want to take over Earth. He wants to go home. he builds a giant fortune in order to go to space to go home and that happened with me I saw that I would need money to go to space I've never driven a car in my life I don't have a midlife motorbike crisis either so I've saved a lot of money in that respect but there was a lull in the 80s because you're right NASA was never going to take me to space I was never going to go on the shuttle and the shuttle for me maybe wasn't a step backwards but a step sideways or a step circular into orbit and we were going around in circles it wasn't going anywhere else so there was a genuine lull so I had to wait for something else to happen doesn't matter how much money I raised I couldn't invent the rocket that would take me to space so I had to continue dreaming about it and what happened was um a thing called the Ansari X Prize which was again a very kind of old-fashioned, almost Victorian Phileas Fogg notion, which said, if you can build a rocket and send two humans to space and bring them back and then repeat the deed within two weeks, you win the Ansari X Prize, you know, for the giant sum of$3 million or whatever the heck it was, in consequential, in the scheme of things.

9:08But it meant a lot. And I saw these guys launching rockets, hand-launch rockets off the Yorkshire Moors, you know, trying to win this prize. and it was amusing. I remember that guy. I can't remember his name. We went to interview him at some point. There was a lot of it going on because it was a price. It was an old-fashioned challenge. So welcome all comers. It was lovely. And then Richard got involved, which was interesting. Richard Branson. Yeah, Richard Branson got involved. Not me. Yeah. But then what was really interesting was that Richard teamed up with Bert Rutan. And then when that happened, I got very interested because I thought, well, it's going to happen now.

9:47because Bert Rutan's involved. Bert Rutan built, designed and flew more types of aeroplane than Boeing and Airbus combined. So he knew his stuff, but he hadn't built a rocket. And Richard went to him and said, I want to win this prize. How do I do it? It was a bit like asking a Formula One racing driver to drive a taxi. You know, it was a bit beneath him. You sort of went, what do you want? You want to go on a suburbital flight, really? do you want to go to Mars? And Richard was going, well, everything in time, but can you just tell me how to do the suborbital? And he said, well, of course I can, but, you know, I want to go to Mars, I've got bigger fish to fry.

10:25And in the end, Richard was kind of bullying him to say, for God's sake, tell me how to do it. The way I tell the story is that Bert answered it with two words, which was air launch. And once you air launch the rocket, things are a lot easier. And so they designed, well, Bert designed Spaceship One and they made the first flight, which succeeded. And I knew that they were going to do the second flight and therefore win the prize. So I phoned Richard and said, right, I'm calling your bluff. I know that you're going to win the X Prize. You've just successfully had the first launch. I'm going to come along in two weeks' time to the second and shake your hand and see you win it.

11:05And he said, well, I'm going to call your bluff because we're not going in two weeks' time. We're going in two days' time and I'm going to LA tomorrow. And I said, well, I'm going to call your bluff. I'll come along with you tomorrow. So off we went to LA, no sleep, straight to Mojave, and Spaceship One launched, and they won the XPRIZE. Bert came up with the immortal line that day of Spaceship One, NASA, NIL, which was just tremendous, tremendous, because civilians could now be launched, you know, to space. And so I found myself in this weird kind of zealot situation where I'd dropped everything at work, got on a plane, gone to LA, seen them win the X Prize, told Richard, I'm in, count me in, I'll be your first customer.

11:46And then I found myself sitting on a huge press conference table with Brian Binney, the test pilots, and Bert Rutan, aerospace genius, and Richard Branson, and a couple of others, and me, and the world's press. Well, Richard kind of announced Virgin Galactic to the world and said, oh, I've got someone signed up already. I then got in a taxi, went back to LAX and flew back home, went into work the next day. I've now gone 72 hours without much sleep. I go into work the next day and all my mates are saying, oh, you missed an amazing thing yesterday. Richard Branson's thing went to space. And I'm going, yeah, I know.

12:22No, it was in America. Yeah, no, I was there. I was there. So it's a mad, mad dream. And that was 2000 and put a date on it, 2004, around about then, three or four. and um so i signed up on the spot that day but it wasn't until 2005 that i actually bought a ticket and then 18 years later on the anniversary of gagarin's flight from winterspace let's talk then about your your mission how much preparation did you have i mean apart from obviously the mental preparation since you were a child how much physical preparation did you need Well said, because that's the correct answer. Well said. In that, you've answered it in that respect, in that I was always prepared.

13:07Bert Rutan taught me a lot because Bert said, make yourself familiar with the unfamiliar and expect the unexpected. So that if you understand everything that's going on on the flight, you're saving valuable seconds. What I mean by that is there are certain customers of Galactic who refuse to go in the centrifuge, who refuse to fly what I call the Vomit Comet because they want to save you for the precious day when they go. They're wrong. They're wrong if you do that. Not least because flying in the Vomit Comet is a brilliant experience and being weightless is an incredible and joyous experience.

13:42So you want to experience it first so that when you are weightless in space, you don't freak out. You don't think, good God, what's happening to me? Even for a few seconds, if you think what's happening to me, you've just wasted a few of the most valuable seconds in your life. so taking back to Bert's point of understanding g-forces there's a lot of g on your body going up so you need to understand what's happening to you oh i know what this is this is the g-force this is this rather than what's happening mrs i don't know what's going on you're wasting time likewise with zero g with wetlessness you're not cartwheeling around the place out of control because you don't know what's happening to you or you're pushing off although i do confess to doing the most embarrassing thing you can do in weightlessness which is this breaststroke swimming motion because i had convinced myself i was not going to do that i've done two or three zero g flights and the first one i did the swimming thing it's pathetic because if you do the swimming thing in weightlessness guess what happens less than nothing so you're hovering above the ground moving your arms around like an injured frog.

14:47You're not going anywhere. Whereas if you touch the wall like that, you will go across the other side of the room. And I promise myself, it's human nature that when you're floating six foot above the ground, that you should swim along through the air and thereby somehow sweep the air back behind you like the air is water and you'll go forward. No, you won't. I did it in space and it's on film and it's embarrassing. I think you're right now about... You will never see it. You will never see it. I think you're right, though, about the, I think you definitely have to do the centrifuge beforehand.

15:21Richard and I have both had a centrifuge experience. And I think to go into space where you are experiencing G-forces and not have that centrifuge knowledge and experience, it could actually, I reckon, it could ruin your flight if you're not prepared for that. You also have done the zero G. And I've done the zero G as well. Let's talk about the flight then. You're going from this rapid, you're dropped from the plane. You're doing rapid acceleration to zero G. Yeah, I'd also done a lot of, I've got a lot of friends in the RAF and XRAF. So I've flown a lot of aerobatics. I've flown in the backseat of a tornado.

15:56I've been in the mid 25 to 80 ,000 feet. I've done some stuff to prepare myself for this. You know, so I know what G is about and I know what aerobatics is about. Pales into insignificance to what happened to me. Not even close. the aerodynamics of a rocket plane which is dropped like the x-planes of old the mothership gets out the way they say fire fire fire and you go and again they told us that in that drop so they say release release release you release and then three seconds later the burners hit and they said it won't seem like three seconds it will seem like half an hour and you'll convince yourself it's not going to fire and they were dead right that three seconds for me lasted about an hour but then when the burner hits my god i've never done anything like it in my life you're rapidly supersonic within a couple of seconds you are supersonic and then you're arcing around and then turning tail and you're going vertical for 29 seconds at three times the speed of sound and that has a colossal effect on you.

17:08And it's three to four Gs, isn't it? Which is quite a lot, really. That's similar to people, what astronauts experience on the shuttle. And when we did our centrifuge, it was around 3.4 Gs. And that was quite unpleasant at times because you couldn't lift your hands up, you know. Richard found, I have to say this, Richard found it way more unpleasant than I did and screamed like a girl. It wasn't comfortable. Well, I didn't enjoy it at all. I did 6G in the centrifuge. Wow. And I found it very difficult. Gosh. I can't gauge what it was on Galactic. But again, I had another embarrassing moment because I'm English, which is one of my curses.

17:59And when the rocket fired, I know the cameras are on us, and I put my two thumbs up in a kind of Paul McCartney-esque English way of hurrah, the rocket's fired two thumbs. Big mistake. My two thumbs were smashed against my cheek by the G-forces, which I couldn't remove for about 15 seconds. So again, there is footage of me with two thumbs glued to my cheeks, looking like an English prat, hurtling vertically towards space and three times the speed of sound. I mean, that could have been worse. You could have damaged your eyes. You could have hit yourself in the face. I'd have bloody well deserved it.

18:37You know, you sounded like Mike Myers in space at this point. Well, as Mr Bean goes to space, it genuinely was a bit of that. So, yeah, so you go from this brutal experience. It's a very violent experience of climbing away the boost section. I was in pretty much the front seat so there's no door between me and the pilots so I didn't have that notion of looking out of the window as they often talk about seeing the blue turn to violet turn to black, I didn't see that because I was instantly on my back and I'm looking at the gap between the pilot and the captain straight through the front windshield straight into the infinity of space from where it goes so I'm looking into the blackness straight away so while I'm being vibrated in my seat as we climb away then you go from that to apogee when the engine cuts out you continue climbing without the engine because of the momentum but you're in space and the harness comes off and you float out of your seat you turn to the left and you see the blue earth and you burst into tears that's that's what happens so the emotion all of those emotions all in one is a lot I don't think we're designed to as humans to experience that it's very difficult to take in it's far more emotional you know you asked about my preparation I prepared for everything except how emotional it would be that's a bit like William Shatner I know I've mentioned it on the podcast several times but his description when he came down from his flight with Blue Origin was poetic and emotional and just incredible.

20:21And it was ruined by Jeff Bezos hurtling over like the bloke out of the office and offering to get him some champagne. Come and get some champagne. No, I'm just describing the most poetic, emotional experience of my life. Yes, but we're having an office party. Come and have some champagne. Appalling behaviour, appalling behaviour. But, yeah, I thought that he was great doing that. He summed it up brilliantly. You talked about you're crying and you're weightless. Are you trying to just mentally stretch out every one of those seconds before you come back? That's a really good question. That's exactly what it is.

20:57When we did the rehearsals, you don't think you have a long time in space. And yet you do. Because if you sit in silence and count out the minutes, you have a long time. Another great piece of advice I got was all the moonwalkers told me to look out the window. But I got a slightly nuanced version of that, which was sit at home for half an hour and look out your front living room window and do nothing else. And it was a great, great tip. It made you more observant and absorbent to what was going on. So when I looked out of that window, I knew this was my one only chance. I wanted to devour what I was seeing.

21:39I don't know whether you can look harder, but I tried to look harder. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to devour it. And therefore, one of the most terrifying things was when I got off the rocket, I was blank. I had to make a little speech. They said, make a speech, stick a microphone out of you, you know. And I couldn't remember the flight. For about five minutes, I couldn't remember the flight. It's overwhelming, isn't it? I'm sure that was my brain. Yeah, the sensory overload was my brain saying, can we just have this a minute? We'll take this off you. we're going to take this over here and we're going to file it and in that moment of my brain being disarmed and debriefed it kind of it was taken off me and parked while they filed it the people in there filed it into where it should be but for that time I thought I've gone through all that and I don't remember it and it slowly came back and the more I talk about it the more it does come back I've only written one piece about it but when I wrote it I found myself literally remembering things in the writing as I went through it.

22:38Like the sound of it clanging like... Inside the rocket, it clanged metallically. Like I said, it sounded like a transit van being loaded with planks. You know, just this metallic clanging of the booms moving. And it's things like that that just stick with you. Virgin Galactic have recently announced, you know, with this getting back in business, that they're selling seats for an eye-watering $750 ,000. And I sort of thought, well, what about all those people on the list? And all those people waiting to go up? You are one of the few who's managed to do this as a sort of space tourist, effectively.

23:18I know, I dread that you don't necessarily want to call yourself an astronaut, but a space traveller. Is it bittersweet that you've had this amazing experience? Yeah, I waited 18 years, you know, and yes, there are friends of mine who were due to go on the flight after me and they will go but they have the patience of a saint and also i think it's you know weird way it's kind of helped them that i went you know if i hadn't gone they're able to say it's a reality it's true trev did it we went you know they're able to say that i wasn't able to say that because you know none of my fellow travelers had flown really and so yes i have friends waiting to go next and they continue to wait i was at like a work for galactic i believe them so much i don't i don't see myself as a customer you know i love them and they've engendered this real sense of community with their with their people with their customers and they do have the patience of saint i want everyone to go of course what about the trevor beatys of today so the i don't know the 11 12 year olds who are doing their geography project saying well i'm going to live on the moon when i grow up do you do you think that's now more of a reality or a more realistic expectation than it was when you were growing up in the 1960s?

24:35No and yes. That's why it's a brilliant question. Yes, when I was a kid, as we were just saying, it's pretty inevitable that you're going to be going to space by the time you're 18. Yes. Then in the 80s, no, you're never going to go. Then in the 90s, no, you're never going to go. And then challenging disaster, etc., you're never going to go. But now you are going to go again. So the hiatus for me has ended. that the decades of you're never going to go have ended and there's a new space world around us, a new space horizon. So I think if you're 10 years old now, it's far more likely that you will go to space than when I was 10.

25:13I just had a weird belief. I don't think you need a weird belief now as a 10-year-old. I think it's pretty inevitable that you'll go at some point. That's why I say it's yes and no. I thought I was lucky to go, but I wasn't. I was definitely not going to go in the 80s and 90s. There's a glimmer I could go when I went and I went. And now it's getting better again. It's strange. It's all about money. And no one ever foresaw the billionaires in the 60s, you know. And that's all changed. Everything we do is space now. I'm watching you now because of space. We couldn't be doing this now without space.

25:50Trevor Beattie, what a fascinating man. I love that interview. Trevor's story is featured in Dallas Campbell's book Space Journal, which you can hear more about in the March edition of the Space Boffins podcast. He's quite an interesting man, isn't he? I mean, apart from being very funny, very good at telling a story, I love the fact that, you know, he's a writer, he's a producer, he's done some of the most memorable ad campaigns of the last 50 years. Not just Wonderbra. which we did mention. He was also involved in a New Labour campaign, which was incredibly successful, and being involved with the film Moon, you know, as we mentioned.

26:37And that was with Duncan Jones, David Bowie's son. So, yeah, just an all-round good bloke and still incredibly enthusiastic about space. So if podcasts, well, let me put it this way, if non-profit podcasts were more lucrative, Would you use the funds to go to space? Would you use the funds for that sort of short trip on Virgin Galactic? It's, yeah, it's always a difficult one, isn't it? Because everything always has caveats. Because if you start to put the money it would cost. Well, I suppose if you're, I mean, on that, I suppose if you're a billionaire, it's still pocket change, isn't it? Because obviously to me now that, yeah, I'd be in debt.

27:20I wouldn't, I don't have that money. Maybe sell the house. I don't know. You know, it's that sort of thing. And you look at everything that's going around you and think, oh. But, yeah, in a world where there was no poverty and hunger and things. You sound like a bit Miss World now. I do, don't I? I want world peace. Yeah, no, yeah. Of course I'd go, yeah. That sort of thing. I'd work out how to solve the world's problems when I got back. And what do they say? Payback or something. Yeah, I'd pay it for it. I knew you'd have the overview effect. That's the American expression, isn't it? You'd have the overview effect.

27:57Yes, exactly. And then I can do it and that will be fine. And I'd still get to do something I really have always wanted. So, yeah, very, very jealous of Trevor, but very glad he shared those experiences with us. For the first time, I really felt what it was like to be inside. It was a brilliant description. This is Space Muffins. We're in partnership with The Naked Scientists.

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29:39And I couldn't believe that we'd been number one space podcast in so many countries. Yeah, we do. It was like New Zealand and places in the Middle East. It's just like, oh, well, anyway, it's probably just as well. I didn't know. I would have got self-conscious. It's also a bit confusing on the rankings because we actually appear twice. So we're on two feeds. We're on the Space Muffins feed and we're on the Naked Astronomy feed. So it's very difficult to know. Really, it's a combined one for the two of us, isn't it? Yeah, it is, but you can't. I mean, no one knows. But anyway, reviews would be lovely.