2008, The Year of the Spaceship

DynaSoar writes "2008 Could be a the year of the Spaceship. Virgin Galactic intends to unveil White Knight 2 as well as Spaceship 2 during the next year, at this point planning for January. Burt Rutan, always reticent to comments on progress of any project, says nothing to support or contradict Virgin Galactic's announcement. However, the report states that Spaceship 2 is 50% complete and White Knight 2 is 60% complete. In addition, Virgin Galactic is considering using White Knight 2, or possible its successor White Knight 3, to put small satellites in orbit for a cost of US$3 million, less than half the current front runner in (projected) low cost orbital launches; SpaceX's Falcon at US$6.7 million. Tourism aside, this could be an extremely lucrative spin off of Virgin Galactic's original plans. If this turns out to be a profitable endeavor, the cost of tourism flights could drop significantly."

Comments

Re:White Knight 2 in orbit???

[savuporo]

I suppose you werent aware of Airlaunch LLC ?
Another possibility, as pointed out in some other posts, if you dont take passengers as payloads on SS2 but do take a payload, which is a third stage, and release it after SS2 motor burns out, you could reach orbit. Admittedly, having a special payload-carrying version of SS2 without a passenger cabin would make third stage separation easier, but there is a reason to suspect that something like that is being considered and built by Scaled. Rutan has hinted about Tier 3 project before.