Virgin unveils first commercial spaceliner

24 January 2008 in Business, Space by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

Image of Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo

OK, it’s not really a spaceliner, ‘cos it won’t be making any leisurely cruises to Mars or even the Moon. It just goes up and then comes down again. But it looks so goddam sexy.

Virgin Galactic has presented the world with this sexy design for SpaceShipTwo, which will start taking paying passengers on a sub-orbital trip in 2010, eight people at a time.

Sir Richard Branson reckons it’s important that the project is a genuine commercial success.

If we do [this], I believe we’ll unlock a wall of private sector money into both space launch systems and space technology.

This could rival the scale of investment in the mobile phone and internet technologies after they were unlocked from their military origins and thrown open to the private sector.

Virgin Galactic reckons the carrier vehicle — White Knight Two — is very nearly finished and will start flight tests later this year. SpaceShipTwo is about 60% complete.

They’ll look rather spiffy parked outside the Foster+Partners spaceport they showed us in October.

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  1. Richard’s avatar

    Richard on 26 January 2008 at 3:56 am

    Burt Rutan, the Gaudi of aerospace.

    Damned if that spacecraft doesn’t look like the old Dyna-Soar design.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-20_Dyna-Soar

    Reply

  2. Stilgherrian’s avatar

    Stilgherrian on 26 January 2008 at 7:49 am

    @Richard: You know, I was wondering whether to mention Dyna-Soar or not. When I was a kid some “amazing engineering” book enthused about the X-15 and Dyna-Soar, and I was hanging out for it. I loved the angular, ugly, XB-70 Valkyrie, and another book I had told me that once the Space Shuttle was built there’s be a flight to orbit every week.

    Yeah right.

    Where is The Space Age we Never Had?

    Re-reading the Dyna-Soar article is yet another reminder that Nazi Germany did it all first. What’s not to like?

    Oh, yeah. That Holocaust thing…

    Reply