Virgin Galactic Unveils SpaceShipTwo

RobGoldsmith writes to tell us that Virgin Galactic has unveiled their latest take on manned space travel for the immediate future: SpaceShipTwo. The craft comes complete with matching mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, and will be officially unveiled today in the Mojave Desert just after dark. "Subject to certain US regulatory requirements that will guide the unveiling, SS2 will be attached to her WK2 mothership which was last year unveiled and named EVE after Sir Richard Branson's mother. In the future, WK2 will carry SS2 to above 50,000 feet (16 kilometers) before the spaceship is dropped and fires her rocket motor to launch into space from that altitude. In honor of a long tradition of using the word Enterprise in the naming of Royal Navy, US Navy, NASA vehicles and even science fiction spacecraft, Governor Schwarzenegger of California and Governor Richardson of New Mexico will today christen SS2 with the name Virgin Space Ship (VSS) ENTERPRISE. This represents not only an acknowledgment to that name’s honorable past but also looks to the future of the role of private enterprise in the development of the exploration, industrialization and human habitation of space."

Comments

Re:Whodathunk

[DerekLyons]

They're answering the question "Can we make money doing this?" Virgin is exploring a virgin market (pun intended).

Partly right, mostly wrong. While you're correct that they're answering the question "can somebody make money selling high altitude thrill rides", the thrill ride market is no more virgin than a porn starlet after a gang bang. Thrill rides have been around for a long time, and are widely available.
 

Further the vehicle is significant progress towards an orbital vehicle. Performancewise, it generates about a quarter to third of the delta v that would be required to get to space (it'll have almost as much gravity losses as an orbital shot).

Nonsense. SS2 only has about an eighth of the energy required to reach orbit. Worse yet, the general design scales very poorly.
 

Extending the design to an orbital one will have to overcome some serious problems, in particular, a serious thermal protection system will need to be designed. But these are known engineering issues with existing solutions (NASA has done a number of studies on reentry of winged and lifting body designs).

Indeed, there are serious problems to overcome - like the problem of building an aircraft big enough to lift an orbital capable analogue of SS2. (You're talking an aircraft bigger than the C5 by a wide margin.) There's even more serious problems with the thermal protection system... While it is true that NASA has generated a mountain of paper studies, our only actual experience with hypersonic reentry and thermal protection systems is essentially limited to the Space Shuttle. (I.E. No, there are no existing solutions to leverage - just a wide variety of theoretical approaches.)
 

In summary, it's not just a glorified thrill ride, but a stepping stone to orbital space flight.

The only way to believe that it don a set of blinders and to wish away a wide variety of inconvenient facts.