NASA Charters Flights Aboard Virgin's SpaceShipTwo

Zothecula writes "Although Virgin Galactic is generally known as a space tourism company, it sees research experiments as a future mission segment and significant business opportunity. To this end, the company has signed a contract with NASA to provide up to three charter flights on its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane. The deal follows the curtain closing on the Space Shuttle program earlier this year and is part of NASA's Flight Opportunities Program, which is charged with providing reduced-gravity environments for research experiments while encouraging the emerging commercial space industry." In related news, a 68,000-sq. ft. facility has opened in California that will assist in the assembly of SpaceShipTwo spaceplanes.

Comments

Feels better...but is it?

[Covalent]

The military contracts jobs out all the time (think Halliburton). The results are mixed at best. This one feels more likely to be fair, cheaper, and successful, but I still have my doubts. As much heat as NASA catches for the flaws in its designs, space travel is VERY hard. I'm not sure Virgin can do it that much better.

Re:When they Ask, Where were you.

[Darth Snowshoe]

NASA chartered flights to low earth orbit. NASA built a spacecraft that's going to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Oh, and another one that's going closest to the sun. And robots to scoot around Mars for years at a time. And a telescope (Kepler) that's found hundreds of exoplanets already. Just for starters.

If you want a bigger better NASA then call your congresspeople and support their budget.

Re:When they Ask, Where were you.

[Baloroth]

Sigh.

Okay, first of all, NASA has been using commercial companies to construct it's rockets for a long time now. The Space Shuttle? Yeah, that was made by Boeing and Lockheed Martin (among others), so it's not like corporations haven't been making basically everything we've put into space already. Same with the Saturn V and I presume most if not all other launch vehicles. They've just been costing us even more because of the combination of government and corporate incompetence (basically, anytime the government contracts out part of it's work to corporations like NASA did, you end up with overpriced and delayed projects. As proof: I offer the entire defense department and it's massive swollen budget. And NASA itself, in part.)

A private company that does everything on it's own is likely to be far (far far) more efficient. Virgin Galactic has already shown this. It's succeed or die for them, while for Boeing (for instance), failure just means more money and a delay. I haven't a clue how you arrived at the conclusion you did. If anything, this makes us less dependent on an individual company. If Virgin fails, we go somewhere else. Free market, bitch. It wasn't a free market before.

Oh, and BTW the other option on the table was to go to the Russians. I'll take an American company long before the Russian government. In a competition of greed and corruption, Russia won about 50 years ago.

Re:1937 called......

[SleazyRidr]

Did you warn them about WWII?

Re:When they Ask, Where were you.

[pavon]

NASA chartered flights to low earth orbit.

And in this case, they didn't even do that; they just chartered ballistic zero-G flights. These SS2 flights replace/supplement the vomit comet, not any of NASA's actual space flight. The fact that the Shuttle was recently retired has nothing to do with this deal at all, and was just a red-herring/troll that should have been cut from the summary.

Re:And in today's news...

[element-o.p.]

No, there won't, no catastrophe required. The limits of materials, chemical energy sources and physics are well understood. Or have you failed to notice that nothing really has changed as far as our capacity to move mass?? A 747 from 1969 flies at the same height, same speed, using the same chemical fuels as today, and it is built with the same materials. Yes, there were compressor blades made with carbon fiver [sic] in the 1960s already.

You could have said the same thing about horse-drawn carriages in the Middle Ages, and you would have been every bit as wrong. We went from hot-air ballons to the Saturn V in under a century, and now we've plateau'd. Our progress is likely to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary for a while yet, but if you think there is nothing left to discover simply because we haven't seen the same explosive growth in rocket propulsion lately that we saw around the middle of the 20th century, I'd argue that you are either naive or ignorant of history. Just because you can't foresee the next big breakthrough doesn't mean there isn't one.

But you can already go on a Mig, rent a Cessna, etc... Do you do that? Do you know anyone who does?

Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I DO know someone who rents Cessnas (...and Citabrias and Pipers and...). I've rented them for about 950 hours of flight time. I have also rented them to others, and taught some of those same people how to fly them themselves.

It's much more fun than being in a sub-orbital ballistic tin can.

Maybe, maybe not. The best part of flying to me was going some place I had never been before; I love exploring and flying opened up new places to explore. However, quite honestly, it only took a couple of years before hundred-dollar-hamburger runs got boring. I loved spin training, so I imagine acrobatic flight would breathe new life into my enjoyment of flying -- for a while -- but I'm sorry...there's something about touching the edge of space and going some place where only a handful of people in the entire history of the human race have ever gone that is beyond comparison to anything else on earth. YMMV, of course, but I'd forsake flying GA for the rest of my life in a heartbeat for a chance to hitch a ride in one of those "sub-orbital ballistic tin cans".