Virgin Galactic: White Knight Two

[andygates]

Ooh!  Richard and Burt have unveiled White Knight Two, the carrier for their upcoming spaceplane.  Like White Knight, it's a twin-fuselage jobbie that carries the spacecraft slung between the two bodies.  Once it reaches suitable height, it drops the spacecraft which fires up its rocket and scoots off to the edge of space.  The White Knights are conventionally-fueled aircraft; the spacecraft use a hybrid rubber/nitrous rocket; only the encased-rubber part of the rocket is non-reusable.

SpaceShipOne was designed to win the X-Prize, and it did.  SpaceShipTwo will do billionaire joyrides and those long-lusted-after suborbital super-fast transcontinental flights, and should keep Bond villains and futurologists happy for a while.  SpaceShipThree is the truly exciting end of the arc: it is intended to achieve orbit.  Three is the money shot.

Here's WK2 in the flesh:



Where WK1 looked pretty damn sci-fi, I can't help thinking that WK2 looks, well, very businesslike and almost ordinary.  It wouldn't be daft to see that, all gussied up in anyone's livery, taxiing around the big world airports.

And because I do love me some nose art cheesecake, here's Eve. 

Comments

[jonnycowbells.livejournal.com]

I agree - orbit is where it's at and I seem to remember reading that most of the competition are aiming straight for it rather than taking this first sub-orbital step.

I think it's 100K for a sub-orbit ticket? Pretty reasonable, although Concorde was better value for money really. You've got to really want to be a zero-g early adopter to part with the cash. But 100K for an orbit? Bargain I reckon. It puts it in the same category as 'Ooh, I've always wanted to own a Ferrari' and people will make it a life goal. The first tickets will be way more than that of course, but give it 20 years and they'll come down, and inflation will make it more 'afordable'

Exciting times.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

I think this staged approach is very savvy. Each stage generates spinoff business - WK1 is being used to design a long-loiter surveillance pod carrier for American intel types - and the jumps are smaller and easier. 100k for a ticket means that some rapper or other will have a zero-g sequence in his video (think "Glamorous" In Space) :)