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Virgin Atlantic Licensing SpaceShipOne
Tigerquoll writes "According to the Australian Broadcasting Commission, British airline magnate Richard Branson has announced a plan for the world's first commercial space flights and has signed a technology licensing deal with Mojave Aerospace Ventures - the US company behind SpaceShipOne. See scaled composites' media release and the Virgin Galactic website"
How will be the insurance cost calculated ?
I mean, there are stats which help defining the cost of a plane travel insurance but there ain't such stats concerning commercial flights...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
If you look at the BBC article, the Virgin spacecraft design is to be called the VSS Enterprise!
Created on..............: Wed, May 08, 2002
Now there's some foward planning!
" If it is a success, we want to move into orbital flights and then, possibly, even get a hotel up there"
-Sir Richard Branson
From bbc
http://efil.blogspot.com/
This is the best news I've heard all year!
Since 7 AM, I feel like I'm living a book by Arthur C. Clarke. I've been waiting for this since I was a kid. I've just been repeating the company name over and over in my head:
Virgin Galactic Spacelines.
Wow.
Oh - and it seems they have a website...be sure to check it out!
The licensing deal with M.A.V. could be worth up to £14 million ($21.5 million) over the next fifteen years depending on the number of spaceships built by Virgin.
The development alone of the technology is predictably high:
It is expected that around £60 million ($100 million) will be invested in developing the new generation of spaceships and ground infrastructure required to operate a sub orbital space tourism experience.
The revenue for flights seems about what one would expect:
Over five years Virgin expects to create around 3000 astronauts and the price per seat on each flight, which will include at least three days of pre-flight training, are expected to start at around £115,000 ($190,000).
So, given all of these numbers, doesn't $21M for a license seem low?
-erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
After having spent 30 years of research in order to conquer the complexities of making
train carriages tilt while travelling along a curve at 150 miles/hour, and taking 15 minutes off the travel time, it's only
a small step to having reusable space craft running shuttle flights to and from Mars.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
"According to the Australian Broadcasting Commission," it's actually a corporation and hasnt been a commission for quite a while. Yes it is still government funded, but the C stands for corporation now-a-days.
-- robin.shannon.id.au This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Recombo Plus License.
I think it is pretty inevitable that Virgin will have to go back to Scaled for engineering services. They will make a lot more money on that in the long run
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Only if you are completely unfamiliar with the way the words `stunt' and `publicity' can be arranged into a well known phrase or saying.
Beardie can't even run a worthwhile train company.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
"Let's just hope that the space-flights stimulate some competition, unlike Concorde, because then the next goal would quickly become 'lunar city'..."
Fortunately for you, the Japanese have been eying this industry for quite some time. And quite frankly, I'm putting my money on the culture that presently makes: The world's fastest super computer, the most reliable cars, the most advanced communication technology, etc...
These guys are in it to win and Virgin won't be able to charge $190K because the Japanese will be there offering $185K, or some other competitive number that would make it cheaper to fly vial JAL to Tokyo instead of Virgin to London.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
If it is Virgin trains then no man has got to the destination, that's for sure. Not on time anyway.
I think Branson should concentrate on the 19th century technology of trains and get that right before moving into the 21st century.
The US went from suborbital unmanned flight to the Moon in almost exactly 10 years:
Little Joe 1 - August 21, 1959 - test of launch escape system during flight, first flight of the Mercury program.
Apollo 11 - July 20, 1969 - Landing on the Moon.
One of the most incredible and awe-inspiring achievements of the XXth century, and I'm saying this when I'm not even American. If it were started from scratch today, everyone would think it would simply be impossible.
You may say that a lot of resources were sunk into this, for sure. However large private interests have even more money than governments these days.
If I had Bill Gates' fortune this is the thing I would do. Get back to the Moon, establish a small base, restart the Orion program from there, mine the outer planets for He3, go to the stars. Would $40B be enough? I don't know. It's the most responsible thing to do if we want to survive as a species.
I like Branson;
...
I have always thought of Branson as a "Nice Guy" yes, he has his finger in a few pies. But it seems to me that when he takes on a loss making public service (british transport ) and makes a good stab at turning it around for the better of the people.... I Just get the impression that his heart is in the right place. I will never forgive the lottery commision in the UK for not awarding it to branson; who promised that all of the money made from ticket sales would go to deserving causes rather than the percentage (whatever that is) that Camelot give away.
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
If so, he plans pretty far in advance:
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
the announcement is step 0. step 1 involves clearing all of the government obstacles. but according to popular /. opinion, that is the one thing that sir branson is obviously quite good at.
if they succeed with step 1, then us geeks can get excited in earnest. step 2 will be development and testing. should be no problem given the monies involved. then of course, in step 3 we'll see many, very rich people fulfilling their lifelong dreams. the rest of us will watch with unbridled envy.
but i fear that step 4 will be sudden bankruptcy, when they quickly exhaust the very small number of adventurers rich enough to afford the still hideously expensive ticket.
I wonder whether they have a license from the Roddenberry estate...
"the ones to actually create the means to make this possible"
Are you kidding? There's little revolutionary about Rutan's design, apart from the fact that it was privately built. What's so special about polybutadine as a fuel? What's so special about nitrous as an oxidizer? What's so special about a launch-at-altitude? You might get some points for the shuttlecock wings, but that's about it.
How much does Rutan's ship cost to operate? He adimantly refuses to say. They won't even say exactly how much investment has been put in! What makes you so confident that this is some sort of miraculous, megacheap craft (as far as *suborbital* flight goes)? The technology that they're utilizing certainly isn't that special.
If you want to credit the *real* pioneers of spaceflight, you need to look to the USSR and Germany.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
There have been commercial space flights for... gee I don't want to waste the time to go figure out what would count as the first one, but it sure wasn't in this millenium, no matter how you count it. One could pretty easily argue for the 60's.
Of course, one wouldn't expect press releases to worry too much about accuracy.
PS. Perhaps they were referring to manned space flights. Now that would be quite different thing. Those of us that work in technical matters sometimes worry about actually saying what we mean.
Actually Virgin is not a discount airline, it's a traditional carrier with a simple network, and so greater control over its costs. As another poster has noted, Branson's competition is the entrenched large airlines such as BA and AA who had it their own way for too long.
Having said that, he doesn't seem to want to compete *too* hard - I just had a look at a flight LHR(28th)->JFK, overnight stay, return next day, cheapest seats: BA £860, Virgin £855 (cf American at £947).
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.