Virgin Galactic
Virgin's Spaceship Enterprise Makes First Crewed Flight
For the first time, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, named the Enterprise, flew with crew on board. While it stayed attached to the "Eve" mothership for the duration of the July 15 flight, Scaled Composites – the builders of the spacecraft – called the flight a "significant milestone as the team marches towards the first solo flights." Numerous combined vehicle systems tests were conducted, as two crew members on board VSS Enterprise, evaluated all of the spaceship’s systems and functions from end to end in the air, and all objectives were achieved.
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Virgin Galactic Dirty Little Secret
Virgin Galactic is arguably the leading private space tourism company, having actually built their suborbital craft and carrier and having flown them both. Their web site and publications all look taken from a sci-fi movie, with weightlessness touted as a wonder worth $200,000. One of the slogans Virgin Galactic uses (in the training page) is "Feel the Freedom of Zero G."
However, there's a dirty little secret that no one over at Virgin Galactic is talking about...
Read all about it on http://www.spacepirations.com/2010/05/virgin-galactic-dirty-little-secre...
First Flight of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo
Barnstorming the final frontier
In the first part of this post, Researching at the edge of space, I talked about the scientific frontier about to be opened up by suborbital flights up to 100 km (62 miles) above the Earth’s surface. The possibilities for science are exciting… but at the meeting I attended about these rockets, there was something else going on. And as interesting as the science involved with this will be, there was something bigger on everyone’s mind. At the meeting, the electricity about it was palpable, and it was obvious what it was.
We are at the very threshold of easy, inexpensive access for humans to space.
Researching at the edge of space
I recently attended a conference in Boulder, and I have to admit that before I went I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Now I do, and I’m very glad I went.
The meeting was the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference 2010 (NSRC2010), and its goal was to figure out how best to exploit an upcoming revolution in space travel: private companies making suborbital launches to the very edge of space.
