LMU Exec. Ed. Students Discuss Space Travel

Loyola Marymount University’s College of Business Administration welcomed William Pomerantz, Vice President of special projects at Virgin Galactic. Pomerantz spoke to a group of executive MBA students on the company’s plan to take customers into space.

Pmerantz discussed the history of how space travel went from the province of government to private enterprise. He discussed SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded vehicle to fly into space and back, which happened in 2004.

He explained that while a typical flight on NASA’s space shuttle cost over $1 billion, SpaceShipOne was built and flown for roughly $25 million.

If private enterprise built a successful spaceship ten years ago, how come Virgin Galactic still isn’t flying customers into space? Pomerantz offered an answer appropriate for a business school: market data.

Potential customers are looking for a few key features in their space flights, like the ability to float weightless in space, or have a beautiful view of planet Earth, that weren’t available in the cramped, windowless SpaceShipOne. But in addition to building a better space craft, Pomerantz said Virgin Galactic’s investor Richard Branson is more interested in building a sustainable business.

Pomerantz began his talk with a pre-emptive defense of spending on space-related research, touching on the possibility of environmental collapse on Earth, the potential riches from mining asteroids or other planets, and the social value of innovations that have come out of space in years past.

The strongest example he offered was storms like Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy, which would have caused even more destruction and deaths if there had been no satellite weather systems floating in Earth’s orbit to give us advance warning of the storms’ strength and paths. But even this example falls short when describing the potential of space, he said.

regions: Los Angeles

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