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.