20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I never intended to start a space rocket company. I started to literally Google "How do you build a moon rocket" Consulting has never been my kind of thing, you don't have enough responsibility I think in consulting for execution, I quite like the responsibility of execution. Rule 3 was "Don't f**k it up". CEO role in that kind of company is 24 / 7 / 365. Stubbornness and stamina are really massively important in any entrepreneurial task. "You're really stubborn. You don't give up. You don't quit, you just keep pushing, keep pushing, until eventually something breaks in your favor and you get there." The smallest mistake can result in mission failure. I think I kind of knew this intuitively, but someone should tell you explicitly you can do anything. I kind of see success as stepping stones in a way, you need to achieve this, to achieve that, to achieve the ultimate goal. ON TOPIC: OF SPACE, OBRITS, ROCKETS AND POTATO LAUNCHERS I do expect people to land on Mars while I'm still alive, assuming I survive another decade or so. Your mobile phone has something like a million times more computing power than, the Apollo that took people to the Moon. Q: "Could you do something like this?"  A: "Yes, but have you got any money?" Orbex today, even with my biased rose-tinted sunglasses on, it is quite objectively viewed as the leading player in a new private space launch industry in Europe right now. Most of the applications of space technology are geared towards driving a better world on the surface of Planet Earth. And what that drives then is a lower economic cost to get things into space. And that's always been the real barrier to getting lots of things into space. To lift a kilo through the gravity well of Earth into orbit is very, very expensive. Once you're in orbit, it's relatively easy to get to other places, but getting into orbit is the expensive, difficult part of space access. I see the gap, the physical gap between Earth and Mars as being the equivalent of the Atlantic ocean, going back a few centuries. I think we're at the dawn of a really new chapter in human history, where we're not just talking about oceans and airplanes, we're talking about interplanetary things in a genuinely realistic way. Space is, I've learned, all about margins - safety margins, margins for performance, margins for mistakes and recovery of mistakes. Getting to orbit is a much, much harder problem than suborbital flight. The difficult part is achieving that velocity and it's a lot, it's tens of thousands of kilometres per hour to get to orbit. Imagine if every time you flew to New York from London you have to throw away the airplane Reusability, that's something we focus on at Orbex as well, reusability and environmental sustainability. The annual volume of Rocket Launches is the global equivalent of the entire airline traffic globally, it's a massive problem, because of that black soot that gets deposited by nonclean combustion of fossil fuels. References, mentions: UK Space Agency, European Space Agency, Orbex, Ariane 5, "Zen and the art of the motor motorcycle maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig, Dame Ellen MacArthur, "Stolen focus" Johann Hari, Lifespan by Dr. David Sinclair, Why we sleep by Matthew Walker