Virgin Galactic’s Space-Grazing Aircraft Is Ready for Liftoff
Wired
After all of the prize money and media coverage, routine space tourism — this grand flight of human fancy — seems about to happen. SpaceShipTwo will be carried aloft by a mother ship, WhiteKnightTwo, which has been flying for nearly a year. The first SS2 is under construction and slated to begin flight tests in early 2010. Virgin has already sold $60 million in tickets to its first 300 passengers. And a taxpayer-funded spaceport is under construction near Las Cruces, New Mexico.
In a year, maybe two — barring any test-flight glitches — people who have the right financial stuff will be rocketing daily into space for a few minutes of sensory overload and ego gratification. It may not be the colonization of Mars, but as Siebold says, “did the Wright brothers have Boeing 747s in their consciousness when they flew at Kitty Hawk? No, but it just grows from here; what they achieved made that possible.†If Virgin and Scaled Composites succeed in making this huge technical leap, a trip to suborbital space will have been reduced to nothing more than a pricey Tilt-A-Whirl for grown-ups.
If you spend enough time around the Scaled Composites hangars, it all begins to sound routine, almost banal — just another project for a company that churns out innovative aircraft the way Dyson turns out innovative vacuum cleaners. Ask the team about the technical challenges it has faced assembling these ships and the answer surprises you. “Um, really,†Scaled Composites president Doug Shane says, “it’s not much of a technical job at all.†It’s a statement that Virgin’s would-be competitors, all years away from putting a commercial system in place, wish they could agree with. And it downplays the biggest challenge of all: How do you take a dangerous and radical one-off prototype and turn it into an everyday vehicle?
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