This story was updated at 1:46 p.m. EDT.
MOJAVE,
Calif. — With all the pageantry of a king's arrival, the WhiteKnightTwo — a
huge flying launch pad to support passenger suborbital space travel — made
its public debut here Monday.
The rollout
of the colossal composite plane signals the first phase of a critical test
program to establish a private
spaceliner business — a venture being bankrolled by British entrepreneur
and billionaire, Richard Branson and his Virgin Group.
Looking
like a giant catamaran for the sky, the twin-boom, two individual fuselages are
topped by a large, 140-foot (42-meter) long stretch of wing. The aircraft will
straddle and carry to drop altitude (around 48,000 feet) the SpaceShipTwo — a
six passenger, two pilot craft that, once released, will rocket pay-per-view
passengers to some 65 miles (104 km) above the Earth.
"This is a
big airplane," said Scaled Composites founder, Burt Rutan, and Chief Technology
Officer and Chairman Emeritus of the company. "It is not an inappropriate claim
to say this is the largest all-composite airplane," he told SPACE.com.
Once a screen stretched across a hangar door — adorned with the projected Virgin Galactic logo of an eye — fell to the ground, the seated audience came face to face with WhiteKnightTwo positioned on the outside tarmac complete with Branson and Rutan waving from separate windows on the carrier craft.
SpaceShipTwo, still under construction, was shrouded in a large black tarp just a few feet away during the unveiling of WhiteKnightTwo. The carrier aircraft has been christened "EVE" in honor of Sir Richard's mother.
Four
turbofan jet engines power the
WhiteKnightTwo, an aircraft that has more capability than needed for
SpaceShipTwo operations, Rutan explained. The mega-plane has undergone
extensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) testing, he said — that's aerodynamic
speak for utilizing electronic wind tunnel evaluations versus wind tunnel
testing.
WhiteKnightTwo
is the 40th aircraft of varying types to be rolled out by Scaled Composites,
Rutan said. "I think that's more than you'll find in any other company by a
large margin."
"The beauty of WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo is that they can help change our relationship with space," Branson said after the rollout. "The other thing that I admire about the system is that it has the architecture that would someday be developed into passenger carrying vehicle able to take people from A to B around the planet, outside of the atmosphere at near orbital speeds."
Branson said he thought it was very important that Virgin Galactic make a genuine commercial success of this project. "If we do I believe we'll unlock a wall of private sector money into both space launch systems and space technology," he said.
Downsize
the uncertainty
While
today's show-and-tell festivities marked a major milestone, the true test of the
WhiteKnightTwo and its flying attributes are still ahead here at
the Mojave Air & Space Port.
Rutan noted
that "you can't have schedule pressure before you fly...because that's not a safe
thing to do. In terms of what the schedule will be to complete, you really
don't know anything until you start flying," he continued, calling it a
downsizing of the uncertainty.
"You don't
know when you're going to be done until you march through the research flight
tests," Rutan emphasized.
Rutan said
that the WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo
system is not a Burt Rutan design.
"We've got
some very talented people...so the credit for thinking and having the courage to
try belongs to them," he said, underscoring the expertise of such people as Bob
Morgan, Jim
Tighe, Matt Stinemetze, and Pete Siebold...part of a team of some 20 engineers
that worked on the endeavor. "Of course, they had to sell me on it," he added.
Spacious
seating
The
WhiteKnightTwo could be ready to do a space launch with only 40 flights — "if
everything works," Rutan said, "but more than likely we'll run a few more than
that."
Largely driven
by the need to snag market share of the public suborbital space tourism
business, Rutan said that the WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo system is designed to
yield a top-notch
flight experience.
For one, SpaceShipTwo offers a roomy — yes, call it spacious — passenger cabin with
great windows to afford a ticketed traveler a stunning sight, Rutan said.
Passengers
riding in the WhiteKnightTwo launch aircraft will be provided a spectacular
view as well — with SpaceShipTwo peeling away and blasting skyward toward
space.
"Riding in
the launch airplane to watch a launch is going to be a cool thing to do," Rutan
pointed out.
Moreover,
WhiteKnightTwo will serve as training ground — albeit in the air — for future
space travelers. The mega-plane can provide stints of microgravity for
next-in-line SpaceShipTwo flyers, Rutan noted, with the aircraft also able to
give clientele six to seven Gs to mimic the forces encountered during a
suborbital space jaunt.
Too
early to say
"For us,
this rollout is a really important event," said Will Whitehorn, president of
Virgin Galactic. "We're going to be flying in a couple of months...ground testing
starts almost immediately after this event is over," he told SPACE.com.
Whitehorn
said that as soon as that ground evaluations are finished and everyone is
satisfied "we'll put it into the air...perhaps in a few weeks or it could be
about eight weeks at the maximum."
Whitehorn
added: "When we are all happy...then it will start flying. That could be very
soon...but there's no exact date." In terms of money spent on the spaceliner
system by Branson's Virgin Group to date, he explained: "We're at 100 million
dollars that has been spent so far."
As for the
readiness of the suborbital SpaceShipTwo, Whitehorn said that the vehicle is now
about 70 percent complete.
"Whether or
not we fly the spaceship into space next year...it's too early to say. But the
ambition will be to fly it by the end of 2009 or early 2010 into space,"
Whitehorn explained.
Marketing
mode
Spotlighting
the scope of what WhiteKnightTwo can provide on its own, Whitehorn offered some suggestions: "I think the market for
WhiteKnightTwo will be a lot bigger than we've estimated."
In addition
to supporting suborbital space travel, Whitehorn said the WhiteKnightTwo carrier
plane can satisfy a range
of market needs from satellite launchings to deploying unmanned aerial
vehicles, or toting large quantities of water to help squelch raging fires, as
well as hauling hefty amounts of cargo from point to point.
"I really think we're on the threshold of a new era of commercial space transportation," said George Nield, head of the Federal Aviation Administration's commercial space transportation office in Washington, D.C. "This just makes it real...because we've got some hardware coming together and test flying starting. It's going to be an exciting next couple of years," he told SPACE.com.
Stuart Witt, General Manager of the Mojave Air
& Space Port, said there's a significance that might be missed given
today's rollout of WhiteKnightTwo.
"It's all
about results," Witt told SPACE.com. "That's why people come to Mojave. The
WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo...they are one more example of a result that will
yield breakthroughs in aerospace. Here at the Mojave Air and Space Port, we're
all about results."
Witt said
the Air & Space Port is ready to support WhiteKnightTwo and the
SpaceShipTwo test program. "I am looking forward for Scaled Composites to get back into the rocket
testing business...and on we go!"
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