Aviation Week reports that Dassault has been studying a suborbital space plane for the last six years:
Dassault and Swiss partners are close to wrapping up study efforts on a potential human-rated suborbital vehicle, the so-called VSH. Study efforts into VSH, a six-passenger, 11-metric-ton, air-launched vehicle, have been underway since 2004. Two years ago Dassault partnered with Ruag, ETHZ and the Lausanne polytechnic to further refine the concept under the K-1000 project.
Dassault’s website describes the project as follows:
The manned suborbital vehicle (VSH) to transport six people at the edge of space. The reliable level acquired with the automatic suborbital vehicle Vehra allowed us to study a manned version in, 2004, dubbed VSH, a French acronym for manned suborbital vehicle.This 11 ton vehicle would be airborne by a commercial aircraft. The separation of the composite (which gave place to a patent) would occur at 25.000 feet and Mach 0,7. Then, the VSH would be accelerate by a Lox/Kero rocket-engine on a suborbital trajectory beyond 100 km, the edge of the space. In spite of the spaceflight, allowing the passengers to observe the curvature of the Earth and to feel the weightlessness during three minutes, the VSH not a space shuttle. It is a powerful aircraft, flying in the maximal speed of Mach 3,5, with features and operation would be close to the aeronautics.
Six years is a long time to study something. This is almost as much time as Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites have been working on actually building the WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo hardware.
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