SpaceShipTwo Design and Pics Released

An anonymous reader writes "Designs and photos for Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic's new suborbital spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, and its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, have been released." Lots of specs and numbers if you're interested in that sort of thing although nothing hugely detailed.

Comments

Cool, but..

[91degrees]

What's it for? Is it only to get rich tourists to a high altitude to see what shape the earth is?

Re:Nothing to see here

[Rei]

Scaled Composites is carefully putting together that vehicle with the high ISP engine, the thermal protection system, and all those other challenges. It just hasn't starting designing it yet.

Oh! Whew! For a minute there, I thought we were going to be talking about the remotely near future and cheering companies on for what they're *actually doing*. ;)

You need testing experience and infrastructure (note, for example, that SpaceShipTwo has its own flight simulator already)

Ooh, a flight simulator! Those are so hard to come by these days, after all. Don't tell me that they also have a 3d model! Perhaps they're being daring and actually doing CFD simulations. Oh, when will this mystical technology end?

What you are seeing is IMHO how a master would approach this problem.

Zen Student: Master, I must leave Osaka and journey to Tokyo. Which direction should I travel?

Zen Master: A tenth of the distance in the opposite direction.

And the student was enlightened.

You build up to it with progressively more sophisticated launch vehicles and extensive testing at each step.

"Progressively" implies continuity. There is no "progressive" approach to orbit from their current design.