So before Burt and I unveil WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo, and Burt tells you about how this technology will work, I would like to take a few minutes to talk about why I consider space to be the final frontier that is so essential to the future of civilization on this planet. It was Stephen Hawking who first got me thinking about this issue, when he explained clearly and concisely to the BBC that mankind had no option but to get to space as quickly as possible and start doing things up there that we have been doing on planet Earth, but in a much more efficient manner. Our population is now heading to 9 billion people by the middle of this century -- that’s three times more than when I was born. With the end of the oil era approaching, and climate change progressing faster than most models have been predicting, the utilisation of space is essential not only for communications but also for the logistics of survival