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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.
As much as I love NASA and the space program, it is time to private companies to start building an industry out of it. Only when private companies find profits in space will we see real progress. Unfortunately, no one has thought of a way to make money off of it yet. Other than insanely rich tourists.
The display on NCC-1701x that shows several ships and a Space Shuttle prototype is now inaccurate... unless Gary Seven sabotages the Virgin craft... hmmm....
I thought the intial flights would be $200K US per seat...or somewhere there abouts. I can't remember where I saw that so I'm probably wrong.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
About $200k per seat. Much like aviation's early days, when air travel was reserved for the wealthy. Give it a few decades and some healthy competition, and the price will come down by an order of magnitude or more. Right now, there's enough customers at that price point to serve the market for years given three or four operating vehicles.
Space...The final frontier to make money. These are the Voyages of the VSS Enterprise...it's 30-minute a week mission to make orbital space as much of a tourist destination as the Carribean...
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I doubt that true exploration will ever be done privately. There's no money to be made that way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Gold_Rush
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bend_Gold_Rush
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayoosh_Gold_Rush
...etc.
mmmm...forbidden donut
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?
You're right, Virgin Space Ship does indeed make the 40 year old geeky technicians sound bad.
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.
yep, delivery is scheduled for 2012....or if nobody's home delivery is rescheduled for 2029
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
Yeah, but what really makes me wonder is how did he afford it? I thought everyone went bankrupt after the "collapse" of the Recording and Movie industry? At least that's what the MPAA and RIAA said.
I hear Bill gates isn't doing too well either, according to the BSA. He's a couple dozen pirated Win7 keys away from begging on a street corner I hear.../p
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
The problem with VASIMR is that it's way too complicated for what you get: an engine which varies between "inefficient, and not enough thrust to do anything with minimum thrust requirements" and "moderately efficient, with much less thrust"
If you want to get off planet, VASIMR does you no good. You need Chemical or nuclear rockets, and nuclear rockets aren't clean enough to use on a populated planet.
The problem with 3He, though, is that that the price is high, but the demand is low. Nothing about collecting it from the moon (which doesn't have much of it at all, just higher concentration than the earth's crust, which would be useful if we weren't getting the current supply from natural gas pockets....) will increase the demand for it in the near-term. Maybe in fifty or a hundred years if fusion becomes practical and just can't be done with more available isotopes, but i've got my money on "we realize that fission is more than enough for the next fifty-thousand years, so fusion research will have plenty of time to figure out how to use elements we have in abundance on the ground"
You want commercial space? Bring costs down. That's it. Getting stuff into space is so ridiculously expensive that communications companies are talking about using airships and solar-powered drones instead of satellites for many purposes.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
As someone who works in the space industry, it is probably due to ITAR. Most space technologies are on the export control list that requires a license to export to a foreign national.
wiki
Some have commented that Space Ship Two is only a thrill ride. That may be so for now but the company is already on record as saying that if SS2 is successful, then there will be a SS3 that will be orbital. There is some speculation that SS3 will be only hypersonic point to point but if there is money in it, I am sure Branson will go for an orbital verson some day.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
"The problem with GOLD is that if you had a huge gold nugget sitting in space, some have said it wouldn't be worth the cost of de-orbiting it."
Well, you can deorbit a solid gold asteroid itself fairly cheaply.
It's paying compensation to the next of kin of several hundred million vaporised civilians that's the expensive part.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Richard Branson disagrees with you.
And now we know why we're all talking about his business and not yours.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
It is a translation of an ancient Ferengi concept, meaning "a business organization".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
But what indication is there that it will have a safety rate like that? If you consider safety as rough function of amount of energy/person required (a reasonable assumption) it falls pretty squarely between orbital vehicles and commercial craft. Add in that the participants are spending far more per person, the failure rate can probably be brought down to where commercial airliners are.
More specifically, consider the two failure modes of the shuttle: an SRB that bursts at the joint due to schedule rush and unsafe conditions, and a falling piece of foam that damages the heating tiles.
1. SS2 has a much smaller motor, making it easy to safeguard. Also, the passengers aren't going to push to launch when the engineers are telling them the engine might explode if they go now.
2. There are no re-entry tiles, because the entry speed is so much lower. Re-entry and landing is better approximated by an small plane than by a spacecraft. Most of the danger in orbital re-entry comes from dissipating the orbital speed as heat. Also, there arent the same aerodynamic pressures on SS2 as it takes off, making it less likely for that kind of impact to happen in the first place.
While it is true that it is the unexpected failure modes you have to worry about, the order of magnitude reduction in launch energy suggests that you'd have to have a really big problem to kill the passengers -- as opposed to an orbital vehicle where small problems can be catastrophic if unnoticed.
What part of this smells profit? None. It's nothing but a bunch of rich people throwing money around to impress each other.
Ooohh! Ooohh! Pick me! I can figure out the part that says profit!
Hint: It's the part where you said there are "rich people throwing money [at you] to impress each other."
WK2 is not fly-by-wire. In fact there is no hydraulic boost, even. Its control surfaces are all human powered by long composite cables.
The WK2 is also fully aerobatic, so it will see high loadings. It was designed for them.
Disclaimer - I work at Scaled Composites, and I am not at liberty to discuss any proprietary information. The information provided above is publicly acknowledged and available from other sources.
-- Len