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Virgin Galactic Shows the Finished WhiteKnight Two
Klaus Schmidt writes "Virgin Galactic today unveiled their WhiteKnight Two mothership, called 'EVE.' It is designed to carry the smaller SpaceShip Two into space.
The rollout represents another major milestone in Virgin Galactic's quest to launch the world's first private, environmentally benign, space access system for people, payload and science.
Christened 'EVE' in honor of Richard Branson's mother — Sir Richard performed the official naming ceremony — WK2 is both visually remarkable and represents ground-breaking aerospace technology. It is the world's largest all carbon composite aircraft and many of its component parts have been built using composite materials for the very first time. At 140 ft, the wing span is the longest single carbon composite aviation component ever manufactured."
Well it certainly looks the part, you do wonder what these privateers could come up with given the budgets NASA work with.
What is SpaceShipTwo if not a custom airplane?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
I will never understand this insistence that everything be "environmentally benign".
The philosophy should be "progressive mitigation" of environmental impact rather than the insistence that everything we do have no impact what soever.
Think long-term. The priority should be cheaper first, environmentally friendly second or even third in this type of project, because, in the long term, the faster we get viable colonies off this rock, the less impact we'll have as a species on our home planet.
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Isn't my car a suborbital vehicle?
What about a piper cub?
And every model rocket?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I will give them this, there is no reason to be polluting when you don't have to be. The technology for rockets and jet planes is pretty well known so it should be obvious as to what NOT to do. Plus it sells. If you advertised your rocket as being seal/dolphin/baby friendly that would go a lot further than saying "only a few puppies got the axe during production".
I don't agree with the cheaper first idea, meaning who is going to pay to clean up after cheaper? Doesn't it come back to bite us in the butt one day? I have been to some former Soviet states and let me tell you... cheaper is OK provided you actually plan to do it better and the problem is most governments don't. Private enterprise will only under threat of court but governments can turn a blind eye to it all.
The joke of it all is the idea that carbon trading or other similar money making schemes excuses them from what they don't do. As if CO2 is actually a problem, it currently is because some people make money on it being one yet the evidence coming out is slowly chipping away at the more marketing that science onslaught that got it popular.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I think the most interesting thing about this whole enterprise is that there are over 200 people who have already put down $20k deposits for tickets, with a final ticket price of $200k each - for a ride on in a vehicle of dubious safety (compared to a modern airline, anyway) that hasn't even been built yet! This seems to indicate that there is vast money to be made in the space tourism industry. Just imagine how many people will likely want to do it once it has an established safety record. And this is merely suborbital - presumably people would be willing to pay much much more for an orbital ride, if anyone ever gets around to building a low-cost, reusable orbital vehicle. I don't know how much all this cost to develop, but I wouldn't be surprised suspect that the pre-sold tickets have probably already more than paid for it.
Don't try to paint my post as some kind of invitation to go all gilded age and turn the entire planet's atmosphere into Beijing's.
In the past 15 years or so the opposite extreme has been creeping in and is now hindering our capacity to ween ourselves off imported oil.
Now every proposed solution must not only be "cleaner" than the technology it replaces, it must be completely and utterly non-polluting
Let's take the greenhouse issue with coal power plants in the US. Nuclear removes the atmospheric and climate issues, and replaces them with a much smaller scale radioactivity issue for which we already have numerous viable reprocessing protocols, but no.. it still pollutes a little! omg we must stifle this!
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Of course. It's a flat beautiful plane, why screw up the symmetry when a little bit of paint will keep it sleek looking?
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
With the rise of the Internet, however, there are ever fewer physical packages to be transported, and maybe no company would be willing to pay thousands extra for just a few hours less of delivery time.
Even physical "critical parts" can be produced locally rapidly by emailing a file and using a 3D computer controlled machining device.
To pay for a rocket, it would have to be a very rare material. Like plutonium - of course, we already have rockets ready to deliver those in 90 minutes or less!
They hot-linked to Virgin's "pressftp". I'm thinking Virgin wasn't expecting that to be hit with so much traffic.
"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." - Arthur C. Clarke.
the collective noun for dorks with no life is the same whatever game your playing.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Rutan is an aeronautical genius. I'd trust his designs immediately over a slew of other corporate designs. It's like pro car racing versus the big three engineers, all (some big number) the really smart guys go into racing, it is just more fun and they can innovate faster and better. In fact, a huge amount of modern day car improvements, for both performance, economy and safety, got developed in racing. Look at electric car development, even the smart japanese corporate efforts aren't near as good as a lot of the startups being built by enthusiasts..because they got passion for what they do, it isn't day to day punch a clock drudge work. Where did personal computers come from mostly? And so on.
We'll be taking trips out of LEO to go mining just as soon as Earth runs out of rocks, and someone figures out how to launch 10,000 tons of smelter. Oh, wait, that's never going to happen is it. DUH.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven