SpaceShip II

September 28th 2006 at 1:29 pm

Spaceship 1 amazed us by winning the X-prize. Spaceship 2 will be owned by Virgin Air and take paying passengers to the legal edge of space. Here are some more details:

SS2 will be about 60 feet (18.3 meters) long, twice the length of SpaceShipOne. While an animation of the flight shown at the press conference features a design of SS2, company officials stressed those are still notional at best, since Scaled Composites is keeping the actual SS2 design under tight wraps until they’re ready to show it off, in about a year.

Most interesting is this:

Branson and Whitehorn also emphasized that they see SS2 as a stepping stone to an orbital vehicle, SpaceShipThree, that would be able to carry passengers but also satellites and scientific payloads at a fraction of the cost of existing vehicles.

On the space access panel I was on in Anaheim I repeated my strong belief that these stepping stones via private business would be the more interesting ones. When the US government tried to help create a nascent airline industry at the turn of the century they didn’t build their own airlines, they paid private flyers a set amount for postage to be delivered from point a to point b.

I’m looking forward to the day when NASA pays a company a set fee per astronaut or per pound of material they want delivered and it is shuttled up by some other company/companies and NASA spends its spaceflight budget on something else.

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