You’ve got to hand it to Richard Branson, he knows how to get good publicity. Unveiling the design for his planned tourist spaceship has put him in the headlines in a way not seen since, oh I don’t know, he decided to buy that bank a few months ago.
Some pretty pictures of SpaceShip2 and the carrier plane that will haul it up part way to space have put him in just about every news source in the world today (examples: AP, AFP, PA, Independent, NY Times, Wired). “The designs of both the mothership and the new spaceship are absolutely beautiful and surpass any expectations for the future of commercial spaceflight that we had when first registering the name Virgin Galactic in 1999,” he says (press release).
Bizarrely, his Virgin Galactic company claims that burning through fuel to put rich tourists into space will be “environmentally benign” (press release). “[W]e are all very excited about the prospect of being able to develop a bio-fuel solution for the space launch system …” says Branson.
The carrier plane White Knight Two will begin flight testing in 2008 but as a number of people have pointed out, there is still no date for when the 200 (and counting) people who have forked out $200,000 to get into space will actually start going. Progress has been delayed after an explosion at Virgin’s testing site last year (Nature – subscription required).
More images below the fold…
SpaceShip2 technical diagram
Mothership and SpaceShip2
SpaceShip2
