First Image of Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo

mtargettuk writes "First image of Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo structure: Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is under construction at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California and Flightglobal has obtained what appears to be the first image of its cockpit section."

Comments

Re:UH...

[justleavealonemmmkay]

It's funny because the Slut plane is actually a Sabena plane. In the 1990s Sabena slept with Air France, with KLM, with BA and finally got a deadly disease from Swissair (who sunk Sabena to delay their own downfall)

SS2 is in serious trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

They are using N2O as an oxidizer, just like SS1 used, but the plumbing line sizes are much bigger. Testing was done years ago that showed severe detonation problems with N2O in plumbing line sizes greater than 2", which was the likely (although not certain) cause of their previous engine test failure. This problem will most likely only be solvable by switching to another oxidizer, which will result in a multi-year hit to any flight plans.

Re:Hmmm.

[Rei]

You KNOW that they are not going to use the same engine for SS3

SS3 is vaporware. It's probably had about as much design work done on it as a spacecraft I designed a while back. And if they don't start taking safety more seriously and end up killing paying passengers just once, it'll stand just as much of a chance of actually being built.

For any SS3 to actually work, they would have to literally start over. On virtually everything. Almost nothing they've developed and almost none of the experience they developed will apply to it, apart from a better understanding of dealing with transsonic and supersonic flight (which they could have just hired people for). the materials are wrong, the engines are wrong, the propellants are wrong, the staging is wrong, and on and on, and they haven't even touched on 95% of the actual challenges of real orbital spaceflight. What they built is far closer to a supersonic airplane than it is to an orbital spacecraft.

None of this means that they *can't* do SS3. What I've been pointing out is that SS3 is essentially starting over. SS1/SS2 is a technological dead-end as far as reaching orbit is concerned, and it doesn't retire or even begin to approach the overwhelming majority of the challenges involved.