After a talk extolling the many accomplishments of the Virgin companies, including tourist spaceflight to begin in 18 months, Virgin Chairman Richard Branson announced that Virgin and Google had teamed up to create a colonization attempt on Mars. He said that he planned a spacecraft that would hold 30 people, plus animals and seeds that would travel to the Red Planet and start the first self-sustaining colony there. Later, Google admitted that it was an April Fool's joke.