Bryan Singer- Virgin Galactic

 

Bryan Singer has a unique take on the world which in part, along with hard work, determination and skill, has helped him get to the position he is in today, as a leading director in Hollywood. He brings his passions into his filmography and privately has many interests including his fascination of outer space and the ability for humans to travel into our atmosphere.

This is seen when he was filming Superman Returns (2006), the sixth and final instalment to the original Superman film series, where he won an award for Best Director at the 33rd Saturn Awards. During filming he knew he needed an epic space shuttle sequence which portrays a plane full of passengers attached to a space shuttle and unable to decouple, leaving it to Superman to save the passengers including his heart throb Lois Lane. He said he was aware that NASA would not let them use their logo for the film sequence so he used his initiative to find another way of making a realistic sequence for the movie. This led to him arranging a meeting with billionaire entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson and his production designer. Branson was starting his Virgin Galactic concept in 2004, which aimed to offer commercial suborbital flights to space. At the meeting Singer showed Branson a pre-visualization of his shuttle sequence and Branson returned with a crude animated pre-visualization of his concept for SpaceShipTwo, Galactic’s first space plan for space tourism. Of course this captured Singers interest as a pioneering concept in line with his fascination of outer space and aviation, leading to Singer being one of the earliest founders in Virgin Galactic and purchasing one of the earliest space flight tickets.

This is also how Branson features in a cameo along with his 19-year-old son Sam in Superman Returns. They are shown as the pilots of the spaceship by using a simulator in Sydney, Australia to create the sequence. Since then Singer has met a number of the other founders of Virgin Galactic as well as future astronauts and has been given unique access to Branson’s spacecraft manufacturing process and spaceport. He looks forward to using his ticket to reach space on one of Galactic’s space tourism flights, which we expect won’t be long now that Branson himself was a passenger in July 2021, marking the first time a spaceship founder has travelled on his own ship to outer space.

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