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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."
That the guy that I guess history will say started commercial space flight for real, owned a company that used to sell cassettes and records.
Just wondering.
No, it couldn't be a design feature to carry that little rocket plane.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
It is worse than that. The shuttle Enterprise was explicitly named with the USS Enteprise as a spaceship in mind. To confuse matters even more, there have now been official references in Star Trek books and other material to the shuttle Enteprise as the first spaceship of that name. So in the Star Trek universe, the Enterprise shuttle existed but wasn't named after the fictional Enterprise (because Star Trek wasn't a television show in the Star Trek universe). Have a headache yet?
Well as a recent Slashdot story told, Helium3 just hit $20,000 per pound, the moon has plenty of it. The Rare Earth metals that China is hording are likely plentiful in the Near Earth Objects.
For each mining venture, you send up a module with two units inside with two solar arrays, a VASIMR drive gets them out to the resources. Unload the mining-module and attach the VASIMR to the transport module, the miner makes ingots which the transporter takes from the mine to LEO, and back. Possibly the VASIMR is always attached to the transporter, and the miner is berthed inside its cargo bay for the first trip.
My two oddest notions here are using mechanical gecko feet to attach the miner to an asteroid, and then using cutting lasers to make oblique cuts into an asteroid producing cones of ore, and footholds for itself at the same time.
Unfortunately, no one has thought of a way to make money off of it yet. Other than insanely rich tourists.
...RIGHT NOW at least. If "insanely rich tourists" are willing to pay to drive down the price of the technology so that I can afford it in 20 years (and all the other benefits that cheap access to space can offer), I'm all for that.
Hell of a lot better use of their money than the government taxing them and giving it to Al Gore in exchange for carbon credits.
With no connection between the tails of WK2, it looks like it wants to twist apart. Wouldn't that stress the wing unnecessarily? Obviously the folks at Scaled Composites know a bit than me about building airplanes, but it doesn't look right.
We've got excess gold on Earth. That's why most of it is in vaults. What about something useful like uranium? How much of that is in asteroids? If we could get over the nuclear jitters, then having a rock full of uranium and/or deposits on Mars would be a great thing. That and water of course, but don't comets supply plenty of water? Snagging resources from low-gravity bodies seems like the first potentially profitable venture in planetary space.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
How do you weigh helium????
I am curious about those "regulatory requirements" that "guide the unveiling".
Anybody know what that is all about?
Gods that's a beautiful spaceship. I will toast their success with fine wine.
This is exactly the sort of thing that got me interested in science as a young boy. Granted that was in the day of Von Braun and Willey Ley and Chesley Bonestell (yes I am that old) but the Universe wrote large in my imagination back then, and I wanted something more than cars that tried to look like airplanes. I wanted the stars. There is nothing as hungry as the imagination of the young.
I was fortunate to work for NASA for a short while in my career, writing software for the Pioneer spacecraft. I've gone on a bit since then, still in the IT industry and laid a lot of networks. But nothing compares with having been lucky enough to work on something that fired my imagination as a boy.
Did I mention that's a beautiful spaceship? If form follows function, then something with that form has to be awfully functional.
There's our Orient Express, people. It's a short step from tourists to passengers.
I salute you, Sir Richard.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
nuclear rockets aren't clean enough to use on a populated planet.
Why does this keep getting repeated? An Orion-type launch would require less than 1000 nuclear devices of about .15 kT yield each. Considering that the US and Soviet Union test thousands of devices with much high yields with minimal environmental impact, using nuclear rockets aren't the doomsday scenario that people think.
Technically anything over the 100km mark counts as space because, at that altitude, the velocity you need to generate enough lift to keep you airborne is equal to the orbital velocity for that altitude.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!