SpaceShipThree to be Orbital Spacecraft

FleaPlus writes "The president of spaceflight company Virgin Galactic has recently stated that if the upcoming suborbital service with SpaceShipTwo is successful, the follow-up SpaceShipThree will be an orbital craft. Although orbital spaceflights would be much longer and could potentially dock with orbital space stations, they are also considerably more difficult than suborbital spaceflights. Other private firms working on orbital spaceflight (and potentially in the running for Robert Bigelow's $50 million America's Space Prize for orbital flight) include t/Space and SpaceX."

Comments

Sounds scary to me.

[ChrisF79]

Without trying to sound cynical, I'm not too big on the idea of a company flying me into space. If you look at just the last month, we had a number of planes worldwide crash for various reasons. We've been flying for about a century now and there are still quite a few issues that bring planes down. I know people will say how you're more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash, and that does have merit, but I'm just saying I don't want to be one of the early passengers on one of these new flights.