Slashdot Mirror
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."
Probably the same stuff NASA does. I personally believe budgets *should* be kept small, even if artificially. This *forces* innovation. If they knew they had whatever amount of money they desired, I don't think the science would advance as far, or as fast.
In short, I think it's the lack of resources that forces people to come up with workable solutions to whatever problems they face with what resources they have at hand.
bork bork bork!
Problem is, if 'cheaper' is your first goal, then your second goal which costs money for no operational benefit simply won't get started on.
From the silhouettes, I see that WK2 has already shot down a Wright Flier, Bell X-1, and Boeing 747, and NASA Lunar Lander.
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!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
More, high-res pictures here http://www.virgingalactic.com/pressftp/
Hence all of the amazing, life-improving innovation coming out of Uganda, for example...snark