Went to a lecture by the head of Vigin Galactic a couple of weeks ago. He was energetic and the 90 minutes seemed too short for the interesting things he had to say.

Virgin was entering space in a cost-effective, commercial way. The technology was impressive, but this was matched by the focused, disciplined commercial approach being taken.

A collection of rich people had put up $200,000 each to book tickets on the space plane. The plane will be carried to 50,000 feet by a mother-plane and then released. Its rocket motor will then fire, carrying it into space.

In the end, however, I felt I had been taken in by the Vigin mythos. Some questions were asked at the end which deflated the project somewhat: how long will you be in space? 15 minutes. Which parts of the Earth will you see? Nothing but New Mexico and the central southern US. The plane can't reach orbit and it can't go anywhere useful. It will briefly escape the Earth's atmosphere, but not its gravity.

The guy hailed the plane's "shuttlecock" re-entry mechanism as a work of genius, but in fact the plane is not going all that fast on re-entry (it hasn't been in orbit, so it's not got much speed to lose) and avoiding burn-up is not much of a challenge.

All the same, getting into space on a relative shoestring will still be some achievement, and if they can make a profit, they will be able to move onto more exciting things.

I went to a premiere in Leicester Square of The Lovely Bones, back in November. Prince Charles attended. The Wurlitzer organ played the National Anthem. There was a speech by Stephen Fry at the beginning, in which he quipped about how it was about high finance and called "The Lovely Bonus".

Now the film is coming out in Cinemas - why have they been sitting on a profitable asset for three months?