British
entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson, has teamed up with aerospace designer, Burt
Rutan of Scaled Composites to form a new aerospace production company. The new
firm will build a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceships and launch
aircraft.
Called
The Spaceship Company, the new entity will manufacture
launch aircraft, various spacecraft and support equipment and market those
products to spaceliner operators. Clients include launch customer, Virgin
Galactic--formed by Branson to handle space tourist flights.
The
Spaceship Company is jointly owned by Branson's Virgin Group and Scaled
Composites of Mojave, California.
Scaled will be contracted for research and development testing and
certification of a 9-person SpaceShipTwo (SS2)
design, and a White Knight Two (WK2) mothership to be
called Eve. Rutan will head up the technical development team for the SS2/WK2
combination.
Drawing from
SpaceShipOne technology
The
announcement was made today at the Experimental Aircraft Association's (EAA)
AirVenture gathering being held July 25-31 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The yearly event spotlights homebuilt
aircraft, antiques, classics, warbirds, ultralights, rotorcraft--as well as the
emerging commercial spaceflight business.
Both
rocket ship and the carrier aircraft will draw from Rutan's work on
SpaceShipOne and the White Knight mothership. The SS2/WK2 system will adopt the
reentry concept and hybrid rocket motor design work hammered out for
SpaceShipOne, licensing that technology from Paul Allen's Mojave Aerospace
Company.
SpaceShipOne
successfully snagged the $10 million Ansari X Prize last year by staging
back-to-back flights of the piloted craft to the edge of space.
Both
of the new vehicles, however, are to be twice the size of the earlier designs.
Future operations
"We're taking the
technology of SpaceShipOne and developing it into a usable commercial vehicle
to give thousands of people the chance to experience the majesty of space," said
Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic--the space tourism venture that is
a subsidiary of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group.
Branson told the Oshkosh crowd that the
commercial spaceship can carry 7 paying passengers, along with a two-person
flight crew. "We hope that we can get those spacecraft built roughly two and a
half to three years from now," he said.
Once the fleet of
suborbital craft is built, a base from which to operate the spaceships is to be
set up within the United
States. "We still haven't decided on which
state the base will be," Branson said, adding that the space tourist-carrying
vehicles could rocket spaceward from the Mojave, California
desert, Las Vegas, New
Mexico, or possibly Florida.
"That's
all to be decided," Branson said.
Seat price expected
to drop
At
present, seats onboard Virgin Galactic spaceships are price tagged at $200,000
each.
But
Branson hopes that this seat price will drop over time. "Our aim is to bring
the price down," he said.
"Our
principal aim behind this is not to make money. The principal aim is to
reinvest any money we make into space exploration," Branson said. "We expect to
double, triple, quadruple the number of astronauts in the next few years that
have currently experienced space," he said.
To
date, Branson said, about a 100 pioneers have been willing to pay $200,000 to
be the first people to go into space via Virgin Galactic. "These are the kinds
of people who are going to enable us to bring the cost of space travel down,"
he stated.
Charting the
investment curve
Whitehorn
said that Virgin Galactic has been negotiating with Rutan over the last several
months to chart out how best to move forward and create a passenger-carrying
rocket ship.
"We
have decided that since this is such a new industry -- and so early in this
investment curve -- that we are actually going to act as the manufacturer and
developer of the ships alongside Rutan, Whitehorn told SPACE.com in a phone interview.
The
Spaceship Company will own the intellectual property of the new spaceship
design. Furthermore, the company will build spaceships -- not only for Virgin
Galactic and its initial order of five spaceships and two carrier craft -- but
for other customers as well, Whitehorn added.
Timetable: not
hidebound
"We
would like to be in development and in experimental test flying by the end of
2007. And we would like to be operating commercially by the end of 2008,"
Whitehorn said. "But this is a unique project. We've made it very clear...that we
are not going to be hidebound to a particular timetable."
Whitehorn said that the new space tourist passenger
vehicle is under design, with a mockup to be unveiled at a future date. No
details as yet regarding the interior and exterior of the vehicle, but progress
is being made, he said.
At
least 50 to perhaps as many as 100 test flights of the new spaceship design may
be undertaken at the Mojave, California
spaceport. That shakeout test period would stretch out over 9 to 10 months,
Whitehorn said. "There's nothing at the moment holding us up in our tracks," he
concluded.
Special thanks to Imaginova's Craig Besnoy in Oshkosh for assisting in
this article
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