Posted by Raimondo Pictet | 0 comments
SpaceShipTwo unveiled!
Remember SpaceShipOne? That very sexy ship that earned its company, Scaled Composites, the $10,000,000 Ansari X-Prize for being the first 100% privately funded craft to reach space? That was back in 2004.
On Monday was unveiled SpaceShipOne’s first direct descendent, the first SpaceShipTwo, named VSS (Virgin SpaceShip) Enterprise. It might not seem like a great step, but it is. SpaceShipOne was a small model testing the general feasibility of the project. SpaceShipTwo is the real deal.
You can find a (very nicely drawn) comparison between SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo here. As you can see, SpaceShipTwo is twice as large as its predecessor. It will carry up to six passengers and two pilots.
Starting 2011, SpaceShipTwo will be the first commercial passenger spacecraft ever. Virgin, SpaceShipOne’s main investor, will exclusively operate SpaceShipTwo during the first few years. Three hundred people already booked their $200,000 tickets.
SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo cannot take people to space by themselves. They have to be brought into the stratosphere by their carrier aircrafts, White Knite (for SpaceShipOne) or White Knight Two (for SpaceShipTwo).
VMS Eve (Virgin MotherShip Eve), Virgin’s first White Knight Two, has already been undergoing tests for two years and has regularly been shown to the public since then. The aircraft’s design is very attractive. It actually has two seperate fuselages, it looks like two planes attached by the wings. Not only will it bring SpaceShipTwo to the stratosphere, it will also be used for the tourists’ three-day training programs. One fuselage could be made into a replica of SpaceShipTwo, and the aircraft could do zero-G flights.
According to the typical sub-orbital flight profile, the White Knight (Two) releases the SpaceShip at an altitude of approximately 50,000 feet, and the SpaceShip blasts off to space.
After the huge acceleration, the engines cut off, and the passengers experience about five minutes of weightlessness, during which they can float around the cabin and admire the earth’s curvature through the relatively wide windows. The spacecraft then enters in “feather mode” and changes shape. The wings actually fold themselves at right angles to the ship. Now, the feather mode is in my opinion the most fascinating invention of the entire program. When reeentering the atmosphere in feather mode, the ship can be at virtually any angle and position. The ship will just slide back to the right positioning aerodynamically.
Once it reenters the atmosphere in this “carefree fashion”, it can retransform itself into a traditional glider and land smoothly on any runway.
Here’s the video Virgin Galactic made after the unveil:
If you have another eight minutes to spare, you can watch this “full introduction”, which was on the Virgin Galactic homepage before the SpaceShipTwo was unveiled. It briefly shows the typical flight profile, explains the feather mode, and gives you the desire to fly with Virgin. Very inspiring. Oh well, commercials always are.
If you have 200,000 spare dollars, what are you wainting for? Book your ticket now!
I’ll just sit here and dream of gathering that amount of money by posting stuff on TechHaze.
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