Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Construction On Spaceship Factory Set To Begin In the Mojave

Posted by timothy on from the want-a-lift? dept.

angry tapir writes "A production facility that would build the world's first fleet of commercial spaceships is set to begin construction on Tuesday at the Mojave Air and Space Port. The facility will be home to The Spaceship Co, or TSC — a joint venture owned by Mojave-based Scaled Composites and British billionaire Richard Branson's space tourism company, Virgin Galactic."

2 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. long term plans? by Vectormatic · · Score: 3, Informative

    TFA mentions the factory will produce:
    - three white-knight IIs
    - five SpaceshipTwos

    so, what will happen after these 8 builds? Any plans for spaceshipThree?

    Cool stuff though, if branson can build some type of spaceshipthree which does orbital flight en masse, this might be the beginning of true private spaceflight

    --
    People, what a bunch of bastards
  2. Altitude is irrelevant. We need velocity! by captainpanic · · Score: 3, Informative

    Altitude is quite irrelevant. It's velocity we need!

    The potential energy of 1 kg at 250 km is 2.5 MJ/kg.
    The kinetic energy of 1 kg at 7000 m/s is 25 MJ (10x as much!).
    The atmosperic drag adds less than 20% to the energy requirements.

    The point I try to make? We need velocity! How fast does that Space Ship go? (No, I didn't RTFA - it may be in there...)

    p.s. 100 km is half orbital only because low earth orbit is at about 200 km.