SpaceShipTwo

I learned about hybrid motors.

The hybrid motors that we were doing in graduate school were similar to what Spaceship One was using and then eventually Spaceship Two, because Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic, which then bought the rights from Skilled Composites.

So I became really interested in that.

And I've been following them for quite a while.

SpaceShipOne's adventure won its maker, Scaled Composites, the cool 10 million of the Ansari X Prize.

Virgin Galactic teamed up with Scaled Composites to form the Spaceship Company, with the plan to turn its SpaceShipTwo into a regular space tourism vessel.

That hasn't happened yet, for reasons I'll get back to.

So why hasn't private manned space flight become a thing yet? Because money.

But Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and his Blue Origin company is neck and neck in the whole re-landing rockets thing.

In 2015, his New Shepard rocket performed the first successful vertical landing after a space flight.

SpaceShipOne was solely funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, while its successor, SpaceShipTwo, is now owned by billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic.

Then there's Russian billionaire Yuri Milner with his Breakthrough Starshot program.

I can tell you little bits and pieces.

So on Spaceship Two, actually, so I was the program manager on Spaceship Two, and Brian was kind of my – cohort in crime, so to speak.

And so he was a business guy.

I was an engineer.