SpaceShipTwo Tests Its Rocket Engine and Goes Supersonic

ehartwell writes "It's official. This morning, after WhiteKnightTwo released SpaceShipTwo at an altitude of around 50,000 feet, pilots Mark Stucky and Mike Alsbury ignited the engine for a roughly 16-second blast. After the engine cutoff, the plane coasted back to its landing back at the Mojave airport. Virgin Galactic tweeted that the pilots confirmed 'SpaceShipTwo exceeded the speed of sound on today's flight!' Its predecessor, SpaceShipOne, first went supersonic December 17, 2003."

Comments

Speed?

[JamesA]

Why is it taking Virgin Galactic so long for development? Is it a financing or technical issue?

SpaceX was founded in 2002 and is already making re-supply missions to the ISS. Granted that's not quite the same as human spaceflight but it seems like there's a lot faster advancement occurring at SpaceX than at Virgin Galactic.

Re:Speed?

[jeffmeden]

Why is it taking Virgin Galactic so long for development? Is it a financing or technical issue?

SpaceX was founded in 2002 and is already making re-supply missions to the ISS. Granted that's not quite the same as human spaceflight but it seems like there's a lot faster advancement occurring at SpaceX than at Virgin Galactic.

They are approaching it from a cost-is-everything perspective, instead of an orbit-is-everything perspective. The SpaceX supply missions run at least $20,000 per orbited kilo. For a person to buy a ticket, even if they were treated as cargo, would cost in the $1.5M range. For Virgin Galactic to say that they will get a human up and down (safely) for around 1/10th that price, requires approaching the problem a lot differently (for example, a multi vehicle setup).

Re:Terribly Exciting - 10 years ago

[0123456]

SpaceX charge rather more than $200,000 per seat to fly into space. And there's a big difference between NASA 'man rating' and being safe enough to routinely fly tourists; if SS2 flew daily and was as 'man rated' as the shuttle, they'd kill everyone on board every two months.

Re:Terribly Exciting - 10 years ago

[sixoh1]

I got a chance to meet Rutan a few years ago here in Colorado Springs at the USAFA - he spoke passionately to the cadets about the fact that when he started in aerospace the speed/power/altitude curve was bent upwards, and then after the shuttle it bent back over itself into decline (think about the fact that the SR-71 is the fastest aircraft in the world right now, and we haven't built a new one in a LONG time). Then he talked about his work, building year after year on the EZ and other aircraft to become an expert at composite fabrication and aircraft.

The gist of his talk was loosely - `get out there and do it - and this time STAY`. I'm pretty sure if you asked him why Scaled is running so "slowly" you'll get an earful about how much they've learned. What is missing from Scaled is the money and industry savvy that Elon pumped into SpaceX. Scaled was really only made to win the X prize, and even with Brason on-board hyping the hell out of it, Rutan is not a "run flat-out" kind of guy. A big difference between the software engineer mindset (Elon) and the test-pilot "I damn sure hope this plane flys" aerospace engineers.

These flights have nothing to do really with space

[hsmith]

I think the "Space" part of it is a side show to what Virgin is really pushing for.

The bigger goal, IMO is being able to enable flight from the US/Europe to Australia in a matter of hours by a "plane" jumping into low Earth orbit and circling the globe in 2 hours. Imagine being able to "jump" to the other side of the Earth in an 1 hour? A 2 hour flight to China? Australia? Europe?

It takes 88 minutes in LOE to circle the globe.

It would simply be revolutionary. IMO that is the near term end goal of Branson's interest in space flight. I think the "manned space flights" are tangential to what the immediate goals are. Hammering out the science to allow cheap cross earth flights, is simply incredible.

Re:Next step

[ArcadeMan]

What do you mean? A woosh at sea level or in a vacuum?