Guest Post: Come Fly With Me!
By Leonard David
Special to Space News
A passenger-carrying suborbital spaceliner and the airplane that will serve as its first stage are starting to take shape on the factory floors at Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif.
Work on the SpaceShipTwo prototype is moving forward, as is the fabrication of the White Knight 2 mothership, and at this point spaceline operator Virgin Galactic is eyeing late 2009 as the beginning of commercial flights with paying customers.
Scaled Composites is the firm led by aerospace designer Burt Rutan, whose team designed and built SpaceShipOne, the vehicle that made a trio of piloted suborbital flights in 2004, snagging the $10 million Ansari X Prize by completing back-to-back suborbital hops within a two-week time period.
When Scaled Composites developed SpaceShipOne, the company viewed it as Tier 1 of an effort whose next step, Tier 1b, would be manufacturing a fleet of space planes to carry commercial passengers on suborbital trips into space.
In July 2005, Rutan and U.K. billionaire Sir Richard Branson announced they had signed an agreement to form The Spaceship Co., to be jointly owned by Virgin and Scaled Composites.
The new aerospace production group was created to manufacture launch aircraft, spaceships and support equipment and market them to spaceline operators, including Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which placed orders for five spaceships and two launch aircraft with options on additional systems. Branson’s order secured the exclusive use of the systems for the initial 18 months of commercial passenger operations.
SpaceShipTwo will be carried to launch altitude by the aircraft White Knight 2, which will release the space vehicle for launch at an altitude of 1,828.8 meters. The space vehicle is being built to seat six passengers and two pilots. The price to buy a ticket now is $200,000, which covers pre-training, the suborbital trip to an altitude of 109.4 kilometers and post-landing frivolity.
At present, Virgin Galactic has $20 million in deposits, said Will Whitehorn, the company’s president. “We just surpassed the 200-customer level in terms of people who have actually made a financial commitment, put their money down and signed their contracts,” Whitehorn said.
Space travel registrations on the Virgin Galactic Internet Web site, number about 82,000 expressions of interest, Whitehorn said. “Those registrations are genuine … with quite a number prepared to sign in the next three or four years. But they do want to see a finished spaceship before they are prepared to commit. I don’t blame them for that. We’re hoping to have a working spaceship that’s actually commencing spaceflight in its test mode by the middle of 2008.”
Special to Space News
A passenger-carrying suborbital spaceliner and the airplane that will serve as its first stage are starting to take shape on the factory floors at Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif.
Work on the SpaceShipTwo prototype is moving forward, as is the fabrication of the White Knight 2 mothership, and at this point spaceline operator Virgin Galactic is eyeing late 2009 as the beginning of commercial flights with paying customers.
Scaled Composites is the firm led by aerospace designer Burt Rutan, whose team designed and built SpaceShipOne, the vehicle that made a trio of piloted suborbital flights in 2004, snagging the $10 million Ansari X Prize by completing back-to-back suborbital hops within a two-week time period.
When Scaled Composites developed SpaceShipOne, the company viewed it as Tier 1 of an effort whose next step, Tier 1b, would be manufacturing a fleet of space planes to carry commercial passengers on suborbital trips into space.
In July 2005, Rutan and U.K. billionaire Sir Richard Branson announced they had signed an agreement to form The Spaceship Co., to be jointly owned by Virgin and Scaled Composites.
The new aerospace production group was created to manufacture launch aircraft, spaceships and support equipment and market them to spaceline operators, including Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which placed orders for five spaceships and two launch aircraft with options on additional systems. Branson’s order secured the exclusive use of the systems for the initial 18 months of commercial passenger operations.
SpaceShipTwo will be carried to launch altitude by the aircraft White Knight 2, which will release the space vehicle for launch at an altitude of 1,828.8 meters. The space vehicle is being built to seat six passengers and two pilots. The price to buy a ticket now is $200,000, which covers pre-training, the suborbital trip to an altitude of 109.4 kilometers and post-landing frivolity.
At present, Virgin Galactic has $20 million in deposits, said Will Whitehorn, the company’s president. “We just surpassed the 200-customer level in terms of people who have actually made a financial commitment, put their money down and signed their contracts,” Whitehorn said.
Space travel registrations on the Virgin Galactic Internet Web site, number about 82,000 expressions of interest, Whitehorn said. “Those registrations are genuine … with quite a number prepared to sign in the next three or four years. But they do want to see a finished spaceship before they are prepared to commit. I don’t blame them for that. We’re hoping to have a working spaceship that’s actually commencing spaceflight in its test mode by the middle of 2008.”
Labels: burt rutan, richard branson, scaled composites, space flight, spaceshipone, spaceshiptwo, virgin galactic
posted by Allan W Janssen | 9:38 a.m.
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