Virgin Master

Are you really on track for a commercial space launch in 2009?
[In] 2009 or 2010. In July we're unveiling the mother ship that will be carrying the spaceship up to 60,000 feet. Next year the spaceship will come out of its hangar and it will then start extensive tests and flights into space with test pilots and astronauts. By the time we open to consumers we will have done about as many flights into space as NASA has done in the history of their flights. I'm going to be taking my family—my parents, my children, myself—so it's going to well tried and tested before my wife will let me take them aboard.

How affordable will a space flight be?
Initially it's going to cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars. But over the next 10 years, we think the price will be able to come down quite dramatically from that, and our aim is to enable hundreds of thousands of people over the years to experience space rather than just a selected few.

What's the impetus for Virgin Money, your financial-services venture?
The idea is to try to help families work together at a time when it's almost impossible to get student loans. Many, many years ago, I was trying to build a recording studio called the Manor, and I needed a second mortgage. I went to my aunt and she lent me the money. It cost me less money than it would have if I had gone to a mortgage company; it made her more money than she would've done if she'd had the money invested, and we both did very well out of it. That's the basic principle behind Virgin Money.

What do you think the future holds for the music business?
The combination of the iPod and the Internet has really been the death knell to the music industry. But I think live music has a great future, and that's one of the reasons we put on big Virgin festivals. [The next is in Baltimore in August.]

What about the fate of your retail stores?
Extremely tough. We sold most of our retail stores around the world a few years ago. Basically because we didn't think that retail had a great future.

How big a business do you think you're getting into with Virgin Greenfund and in general getting involved in alternative energy?
It's obviously going to be a very big business for us, because we pledged 100 percent of all the profits we make in airlines over the next 10 years will be invested in clean energy and trying to develop clean fuels. I'm more convinced than ever the world is spiraling out of control and that global warming could end up killing billions of people on Earth.