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Design for Virgin Galactic's VSS Enterprise unveiled |
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Written by Derek Kessler on
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
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 Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and manufacturer Scaled Composites today unveiled the design for the first commercial passenger sub-orbital craft: the VSS Enterprise. The ship is modeled after the Ansari X-Prize winning Scaled Composites craft SpaceShipOne, the new ship is larger and will fly higher; the design is called SpaceShipTwo, and its mothership is WhiteKnightTwo.
Essentially the design is a scaled-up version of that Scaled Composites used to win the $10 million X-Prize in 2004. It is a two-part system, the WhiteKnightTwo mothership - a dual-hull jet plane that will carry the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane to a high altitude where it will not require as much thrust to reach the edge of space.
However, unlike the original, the WhiteKnightTwo features two cabins in a catamaran-like design that essentially duplicates the cabing of SpaceShipTwo, giving passengers a chance to get familiar with the craft before actually going into space. The WhiteKnightTwo will still be a high-flying plane and will perform parabolic dives to create temporary periods of weightlessness (NASA uses this technique to train astronauts - and it was used to film the weightless scenes in Apollo 13).
SpaceShipTwo - the first of a planned several Virgin Galactic suborbital ships will be named Enterprise - will launch from the WhiteKnightTwo at 50,000 feet. After firing its hybrid liquid-fuel rocket engine, it will reach an altitude of at least 68 miles (110 km). The space shuttle orbits at 236 miles above the Earth. SpaceShipTwo will carry six passengers with room for floating around in the cabin without bonking one's head on the roof. Passengers will pay $200,000 a head, and Branson says that Virgin Galactic has already seen 100 sign-up even without the ship being revealed (that's $20,000,000, if you were wondering about the math).
Virgin Galactic expects to begin flying thier first craft in 2009 or 2010.
Images courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
Discuss: TrekUnited Forum
Thanks to Bill for the tip!
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