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."

Comments

Cool, but...

[WindBourne]

1. When does the next SpaceX Falcon fly?
2. When will Rutan pursue a true LEO space vehicle?

We can use all of these.

Re:Pretty impressive

[CRCulver]

Efforts such as these give the impression the advances in spaceflight will gravitate towards commercial companies catering to consumers

In his novel Firestar , the first volume of a future history attempting to be a realistic vision of the rise of human spaceflight, Michael Flynn had FedEx as one a major sponsor of private launches. Being able to deliver a package anywhere on Earth in 90 minutes, Flynn thought, would be an incredible advantage to a courier firm. 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. Now, except for space tourism, I'm hard-pressed to find any commercial use for mere orbital flights (as opposed to getting out there and mining).