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Construction On Spaceship Factory Set To Begin In the Mojave
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."
My suggestion is to have tiny crates all around with scraps metal and drugs.
-Woof woof woof!
Headlines like that give me goosebumps.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
saying "We require more Vespene gas"
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
They should call this facility REPCONN Aerospace
.. and P.F. Hamilton likes to include timelines, e.g.
2020 — Cavius base established. Mining of lunar subcrustal resources starts.
2037 — Beginning of large-scale geneering on humans; improvement to immunology system, eradication of appendix, organ efficiency increased.
2041 — First deuterium-fuelled fusion stations built; inefficient and expensive.
2044 — Christian reunification.
2047 — First asteroid capture mission. beginning of Earth’s O’Neill halo.
I'd love to see this story as one of those timeline points...
Yawn. Wake me when they start building an orbiting spaceship factory.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
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.
Why not call it Mos Eisley?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
the government did this first in the days when supercomputers were less powerful than iphones and droids. back then the engineers had to actually do the math by hand and test everything via trial and error
Hey, can we stop complaining already? NASA and the rest of the space "industry" has had 50 years to make the geek dream of going into space possible for the (more or less) common man. Sub-orbital still counts as space, although it would seem it's not "enough" space for some.
NASA's manned program hasn't done much more than allow a select few to pedal circles around the planet since the end of Apollo. Sure, there were some amazing developments and innovations from that, but the act of getting to orbit? Who cares? You did that 50-ish years ago as well. The shuttle should never have gotten off the ground, and certainly should have been mothballed after Challenger. It was obvious by then that the program was vastly more expensive than expected anyway. All those satellites would have still gone up on conventional rockets, and much of the science could have been sent up in automated labs.
Imagine what 10 or 15 years of the manned spaceflight budget going into finding some other way into orbit might have produced. There have been proposals and ideas for decades, but with the shuttle eating up most of the budget, there was never the funding to really TRY. Sure it may have produced nothing at all (unlikely i think), but we'll never know.
Not trying to sound like a NASA hater, I love space and spaceflight. What I don't love is trillions of dollars spent to go in circles and make work for the astronaut corps.
It should be noted that Scaled Composites has been a unit of Northrop Grumman for a couple of years now. With Burt Rutan retiring, it will become more under NGC control. However, NGC does not have a regular rocket launch unit as Boeing and Lockheed does, so there's no reason that NGC will not continue allowing Scaled Composites to prosper.
Shouldn't it be called 'shipyard' instead of 'factory'?
we could also spend 50 billion fixing the Katrina disaster, which would create 10's of thousands of jobs. It would have the side benefit of having that area look like cit's in a civilized country.
Of course, in a country where that part of the country complains the feds aren't helping, and ALSO complains the government is 'too big'* so they vote republican**. Maybe they deserve to live in squalor.
*what the hell does that even mean?
**which makes no sense because for 50 years spending has alway gone up signifigantly during pub control. Look it up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on