008: Richard Branson – Moving Forward Together Response

• “You are an incredible, incredible team reaching for an incredible dream and everyone wants you to get there. Be brave.”
• “I wish that the families of the brave pilots get all the necessary comfort from knowing that they were living a dream, and helping other people dream with space flight.”
• “Please tell the entire Virgin and Scaled team that the thoughts of the ISS crew is with them and their families. I wish you guys that your program will recover from this and get even stronger afterwards! To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!”
• “Space flight is incredibly difficult, and we commend the passion of all in the space community who take on risk to push the boundaries of human achievement.”
• “The courage and commitment of your fellow team will soon help you all to recover, and from the energy of grief, the phoenix will arise with even more resolve and commitment.”

This was drawn by Eastfist. See more of his work at his page.

To fully understand the context of this comic, you need to know that Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed earlier this month on 01 Nov 14. There was a fatality while another pilot was severely injured. This is a tragedy and a severe blow to the progress of space flight. I hope that this comic can depict the weighty issues of this incident in a relateable manner.

If you are wondering where the quotes in the comic came from, they came from a post Sir Richard Branson made on Virgin’s website. The post is called Moving Forward Together. I encourage you to take a look at it. The post mainly lists supportive messages from all around the world to the team at Virgin Galactic and its sub contractor Scaled Composites. These messages and quotes from complete strangers have helped the team members through their grief. Hopefully, this show of support can help push them along in their quest to advance humanity’s growth through space flight.

These quotes were so heartfelt and true that I could feel it just by reading them. I couldn’t help but piece some of these quotes together into a comic/story that everyone can understand and feel inspired by. I think they serve as a reminder that people can be mindful and supportive to one another. These quotes showed me the human spirit in a very raw form.

Personally, I have always liked and supported the idea of space flight. This planet cannot contain billions of us. It cannot support all of us at the same time. Finding new places and new resources for all of humanity is a huge and extremely difficult goal. But ultimately, it is a necessary and worthy goal.

Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites may only be taking a small step in the grand scheme of this goal, but it’s still a remarkable step in the right direction. It is tragic to have to lose someone along the way to achieve this, but hopefully, at the end of it, such losses will not go to waste. Let us hope that when practical spaceflight is achieved, those who gave their lives for this honorable goal will be immortalised as the ones who paved the way for the rest of us.

I am unsure how you, the reader, will react to this comic. Whatever you say, please remember to be respectful.