By Patrick Hatch
Not many people have business cards that specify which planet their office is on. Enrico Palermo is one of them.
"I pinch myself everyday," the 37-year old Australian says of his job as vice-president and general manager of The Spaceship Company.
Palermo runs day-to-day operations at the Virgin Galactic sister company building spacecraft which – all going to plan – will soon take wealthy tourists on joyrides into space.
"One of the reasons I sit on the shop floor is I look up and there's a spaceship. It is surreal, but this is the new future."
Enrico Palermo, executive vice-president of The Spaceship Company, in front of the VSS Unity at the company's headquarters in the Mojave Desert. Credit: Patrick Hatch
Palermo's office in California's Mojave Desert (in the "USA, EARTH", according to his business card) is a long way from his hometown of Perth, where as a teenager the night sky and science fiction films sparked a life-long obsession with space travel.
He studied engineering, applied mathematics and physics at the University of Western Australia and started his engineering career with local energy giant Woodside, working on its offshore rigs.
He moved to London in 2005, where he thought there would be a better chance of joining the space race, and eventually received a scholarship from the International Space Agency to study at the International Space University in France.
Joining Virgin Galactic in 2006, Palermo has been instrumental in progressing Virgin founder Richard Branson's dream of starting the world's first space tourism company.
That project suffered a major setback in 2014 when its VSS Enterprise spaceship crashed during a test flight, killing the co-pilot.
"It was a tragic day," Palermo says while giving Fairfax Media a tour of TSC's headquarters. "We lost a friend and we lost the vehicle that many of us were working on."
The program looked on shaky ground after the fatal crash, and Palermo says it took a long time for his team to recover psychologically. But it is back on track with its new craft, the VSS Unity.
It has completed three glide flights, where it detaches from its WhiteKnightTwo launching aircraft at altitudes of about 50,000 feet. Palermo say the team plans to later this year start test flights using Unity's rocket, designed to propel the craft out of Earth's atmosphere.
About 700 future astronauts have signed up and paid the $US250,000 ($333,000) deposit for the experience. The 1.5-hour journey will take a crew of two pilots and up to six passengers more than 100 kilometres above the earth's surface.
Palermo says their motivations vary: some are adrenaline junkies, some want to appreciate the finite and precious nature of our world. Others want to be pioneers, with many passengers, hailing from 58 countries, set to be the first of their nation to go into space.
"The amount of humans going into space is going to grow exponentially – they're going to be right at the beginning of that," he says.
Virgin Galactic has stopped saying when it plans to start commercial operations, but Branson recently said he would be disappointed if he had not taken the journey by next year.
It comes at a time of massive private investment from the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin in space exploration, which has up to now been the domain of government entities like NASA.
While primarily a tourism business, Palermo says spaceships the company is developing will have applications for scientific research, such as zero-gravity experiments used in medical research.
In the long term, TSC's efficient method of getting spacecraft out of earth's atmosphere could be applied to point-to-point commercial passenger travel, cutting flight time from Australia to the US to less than two hours.
"You always talk to people that saw the Apollo missions and they figured that in their lifetime we'd all be flying to space and that hasn't happened," he says.
"Partly Virgin Galactic is born out of Richard's frustration that that hasn't happened.
"What we're doing with this program ... is really changing the paradigm of the cost to get to space. And with that we're going to open up market opportunities we haven't even envisioned yet."
The reporter travelled to California as a guest of Virgin Australia