Posted on 01/29/2008 10:44:28 AM PST by Freeport
Virgin Galactic expects Scaled Composites to roll out its SpaceShipTwo (SS2) carrier aircraft White Knight II (WK2) in early May for ground tests.
Construction of the four-engine, twin-fuselage prototype is 80% complete at Scaled's Mojave, California facility, said Virgin Galactic at the New York unveiling of SS2 and WK2 on 23 January.
The WK2 will have an all-carbonfibre airframe with a 42.7m (140ft) wingspan, 23.7m overall length and a tail height of 4.5m. Powered by four Pratt & Whitney Canada PW308 turbofans, the aircraft will have a range, carrying its SS2 payload, of more than 4,200km (2,270nm).
"First flight will be during the summer", and will follow a period of ground-testing, says the space tourism company's commercial director Stephen Attenborough.
Scaled's engineers had been hoping to make WK2 ready to fly at the AirVenture show in Oshkosh in July, but that is now "unlikely", says Attenborough.
Because the WK2's two fuselages will share a common cabin design with the SS2 suborbital vehicle, the carrier aircraft will be used for pilot and passenger training for the spaceship's flights.
WK2 goes 60K SS1 will take you up to 90..
Not to mention ... NASA and the USAF already achieved this feat nearly 50 years ago....
What was the ceiling on that guy?
Quite a few ... but then again, they were making stuff up as they went along. And they have a pretty solid process in place to learn from their mistakes, and to try to prevent mistakes before they happen.
There is really no excuse for the sorts of accidents that hit Scaled Composites or the Falcon X launch. Those were basic operations. Common sense, not to mention plenty of lessons learned from NASA, DoD, and industry, were available to prevent what happened.
The pilots got their astronauts’ wings, if that’s what you’re asking.
Yup —once again the private sector leads the way.....
Sounds like the story of Xerox PARC.
Never heard of it - details?
Highest altitude ever reached was Flight 91: 67 miles alt, 3794 mph
Fastest flight was Flight 188: 36.3 miles alt, 4519 mph.
Richard Branson is behind turning this into a business. He has a pretty good track record.
Umm Challenger was not 'making stuff up' nor was columbia
"And they have a pretty solid process in place to learn from their mistakes, and to try to prevent mistakes before they happen."
Right and the private companies must not care about working out or learning from mistakes..
There is really no excuse for the sorts of accidents that hit Scaled Composites or the Falcon X launch.
Umm three astronauts dies in a cabin fire during a nasa test... excuse for that?
No I was wondering what the actual altitude was..
SS2 will go to 90 miles, thats 23 miles higher than the X-15, It will carry 8 people 6 more than the X-15..
I will not take that as an intentional callous and foolish an insult as it appears on the screen.
What you really mean is "tell it to the dead guys' lawyers."
Good safety PRACTICE is not the same as good safety CYA DOCUMENTATION.
Documentation is for institutional memory of 'good practice', but paper does not protect you from getting your tie caught in the lathe.
In fact, I see false-sense-of-documentation-security as what precipitated the GEOS? fallover. The people who cranked the table ASSUMED that all the paperwork had been done and the bolts were in the sat...except it was a bad assumption.
It works both ways.
Too many people forget that idiotic that piece of paper has hamstrung space development for the last 40 years.
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. They're the ones who invented the graphical user interface (let Apple have the idea in exchange for a little stock), object-oriented programming, Ethernet (Bob Metcalfe invented it there, left to found 3Com), WYSIWYG word processing, PostScript (John Warnock created its predecessor at PARC, then founded Adobe to start the desktop publishing revolution) and laser printing. I believe laser printing is the only one of those that ever made Xerox significant money.
Oh, like those two guys at princeton that invented visicalc.
Well, companies sometimes do stupid things - that is the down side of accepting risk.
Motorola had a good track record ... before they launched the Iridium venture. Among other things, it turned out that their business case was fundamentally unsound....
Steve McCaw had a good track record, too, and he came up with the bright idea for Teledesic -- the idea was to launch a huge constellation of satellites to create an "internet in the sky." The plan failed for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that Teledesic corp. was impossible to work with -- but had they launched, their business model was so laughably wrong that they'd have failed big, too.
The Iridium system actually works OK, technologically (after years of learning stuff the hard way). But it's not a sound commercial venture. Most folks prefer to use standard cell phones instead.
In Branson's case, the idea is apparently that they'll get lots of folks to line up to ride this thing for something like $10,000 a pop.
At 6 passengers per flight, they'd need to have operating expenses of less than $60,000 just to break even. Considering the infrastructure involved: equipment, expendables, people, insurance, etc., I find it very difficult to believe that they'd break even on a per-flight basis; and I seriously doubt they'd have a customer base wide enough to sustain a company for any length of time.
One more thing: Iridium failed for one main reason: they didn't account for the competition from terrestrial cell phones.
Branson will need to contend with competition from companies like Zero Gravity Corp., which offers 3-4 hour "weightless" flights for $3,500. No, they won't be "in space," but their experience is much more "space-like" than Branson's will be.
Ah, the first "killer app." He did market it and make money off of it. I even bought a copy back in the day. But back then you couldn't patent software, so other companies used the idea to write much better spreadsheet software than VisiCalc.
PARC just had a habit of inventing cool stuff and then doing practically nothing with it or just completely blowing the capitalization of it. Their employees, however, saw the potential of the technologies and left to capitalize on them.
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