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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."

10 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. New Vegas... What about mutants? by Tei · · Score: 3, Funny

    My suggestion is to have tiny crates all around with scraps metal and drugs.

    --

    -Woof woof woof!

  2. I must be dreaming by Sockatume · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Headlines like that give me goosebumps.

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    No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
  3. I'm waiting for an unearthly voice... by Dexter+Herbivore · · Score: 3, Funny

    saying "We require more Vespene gas"

  4. 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

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    People, what a bunch of bastards
    1. Re:long term plans? by Seth+Kriticos · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Orbital flight is still future talk for them. The WhiteKnight/SpaceShipTwo combos can only do sub-orbital flights (around 100 km, half of orbital flight). But they are also quite cheep at $200k. Maybe in a few years they'll offer leo/geo flights too, or maybe even further.

    2. Re:long term plans? by kingturkey · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Wikipedia says the plan for SpaceShipThree will be point-to-point sub-orbital flights rather than orbital as previously planned. But obviously that's contingent on their continuing success.

      I'm truly amazed that they're this far along, I've previously written this stuff off as fantasy but it really is happening. There aren't hovercars but we're almost living in the future.

  5. Fallout New Vegas?? by Dudibob · · Score: 3, Funny

    They should call this facility REPCONN Aerospace

  6. The Mojave Spaceport.... by benwiggy · · Score: 5, Funny

    You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

  7. 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.

  8. Re:Private Sector efficiency! by alen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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