Beam Me Up - Space Travel For Beginners (Virgin Galactic)

Virgin Galactic is a company established by Richard Branson's Virgin Group to undertake the challenge of developing space tourism for everybody.

Virgin Galactic will own and operate privately built spaceships, modelled on the history-making SpaceShipOne craft. These spaceships will allow affordable sub-orbital space tourism for the first time in our history.

Due to the unique technology developed by Burt Rutan, this space craft design has overcome the difficult issues of re-entry into the earth's atmosphere faced by so many designers trying to create efficient, re-usable space vehicles.

We believe that it is in mankind's interest to develop our knowledge and understanding as well as access to space. Every customer of Virgin Galactic will be helping the development of a new generation of space craft.

Designs for the Virgin Galactic craft are progressing on a weekly basis at Rutan's base in Mojave, California and by early 2005 the final design for the maiden Virgin Galactic ship, the VSS (Virgin SpaceShip) Enterprise, should be signed-off.

What will follow will be a concerted Research and Development programme to earn the craft their qualification to carry some of the world's first scheduled space tourists. Safety is paramount. It is planned to have multiple levels of redundancy on key systems in order to achieve a very robust system in every phase of flight.

Virgin's experience in aviation, adventure, luxury travel and cutting-edge design will be vital in contributing to the design of the spaceship, the smooth operation of the spaceline and creating an unforgettable experience unlike any other available to mankind.

"We've always had a dream of developing a space tourism business and Paul Allen's vision, combined with Burt Rutan's technological brilliance, have brought that dream a step closer to reality. The deal with Mojave Aerospace Ventures is just the start of what we believe will be a new era in the history of mankind, one day making the affordable exploration of space by human beings a real possibility." Richard Branson

The reason Virgin Galactic has become possible is thanks to the vision of one man, Paul G. Allen, who has taken the risk of funding the world's greatest aviation designer of the modern era - Burt Rutan.

Rutan's vision for mass space travel was born in the early years of interplanetary transport. The fathers of space exploration never planned sending man into space on what are basically large intercontinental ballistic missiles. They foresaw that people would somehow be taken up to a height and then launched into space. The Cold War forced the hand of space development. All the budget for space technology was usurped for military development, so the space programme became geared to what the superpowers were building - missiles.

Burt Rutan has gone back to basics and developed a number of things crucial to making Virgin Galactic and sub-orbital space tourism possible:

Firstly, the technology to get people into and back from space cheaply and simply, using an environmentally friendly aircraft that creates virtually no pollution.

The key to Rutan's design is a craft, which on its return to earth turns from a beautiful sleek space plane into a 'shuttlecock' - to gently drift back through the atmosphere without overheating. It then metamorphoses once again into a conventional aircraft shape ready for landing.

Cost is another factor to make space tourism of the moment not of the future. Burt adopted a much more efficient, and up to date approach to making his space craft, using composite materials as opposed to metals. The most important factor that brings us to the precipice of mass space exploration is safety. Burt has utilised a much safer fuel than ever before - nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and rubber. The two things separately are inert. Only when the nitrous oxide has been forced onto the rubber and then ignited will the motor start, producing its tremendous energy. This is much safer than liquid propulsion systems or solid fuel rockets.

All these elements would be useless without the final component to this breakthrough - the ability to carry people into space without first having to train them for half a year at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.

A few days of medical assessment and pre-flight familiarisation is all the space tourists of this decade will require prior to their real ET experience.

Conceptual artwork depicts New Mexico spaceport, given a preliminary price tag of $225 million. Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has struck a 20-year lease on the futuristic spaceport to handle the firm’s suborbital spaceliner operations. Artwork: Courtesy Virgin Galactic

3 posted on 01/21/2006 6:40:40 AM PST by ovrtaxt (I looked for common sense with a telescope. All I could see was the moon of Uranus.)

this is screaming out for you, marteen.

Thanks for telling eveyone I'm a virgin, xs.

THANKS A LOT.

6 posted on 01/21/2006 6:46:58 AM PST by ovrtaxt (I looked for common sense with a telescope. All I could see was the moon of Uranus.)

For a long time I admired Branson for his ability to promote his businesses with imaginative publicity stunts designed to project an image bigger than the reality. His, "Peck's Bad Boy" persona was kind of charming when he was a young hustler in his twenties who rode Virgin Records to a multi million dollar buyout and rolled the money over into Virgin Airlines. He has chutzpa but the act is wearing a bit thin. His "Virgin Galactic" is a figment of Branson's PR dream works and it will stay a dream - but in the meantime it will have reaped millions in free publicity for his airline business, which has been the point all along.

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