Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic Unveil Space Tourism Spaceship

Virgin Galactic today unveiled the design of its new, environmentally benign, space launch system based on the X Prize winning technology of SpaceShipOne, which successfully flew into space for the third time in October 2004 and won the $10m Ansari X Prize.

The construction of the White Knight Two (WK2) mothership, or carrier aircraft, is now very close to completion at Scaled Composites in Mojave, CA and is expected to begin flight testing in the summer of 2008. It is the world’s largest, all carbon composite aircraft; it has a unique high altitude lift capacity, capable of launching SpaceShipTwo and its eight astronauts into sub-orbital space flight. The WK2 mothership is powered by four Pratt and Whitney PW308A engines which are amongst the most powerful, economic and efficient engines available. The WK2 mothership has also been designed to be capable of lifting other payload and launching it into space. Both Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic believe the system has sufficient lifting capability to launch unmanned vehicles designed to carry small satellites and other scientific payload into low earth orbit. While the first priority for Virgin Galactic is developing the market for human spaceflight, the Company is already assessing the potential for unmanned launch capability.

SpaceShipTwo is now nearly 60% complete. It incorporates both the lessons learned from the SpaceShipOne program and the market research conducted by Virgin Galactic into the requirements future astronauts have for their space flight experience. It also has built-in flexibility to encompass future requirements for other scientific and commercial applications.

Whilst the two vehicles comprising the space launch system have been under construction, Virgin Galactic’s cadre of future astronauts has continued to grow strongly to well in excess of 200 individuals with around 85,000 registrations of interest to fly. The deposit base now exceeds $30m representing more than $45m of future income to the fledgling spaceline.

Astronaut orientation for spaceflight is progressing well and already 80 of SpaceShipTwo’s first passengers have been through medical assessment and centrifuge training at the NASTAR facility in Philadelphia. During their G Force acclimatization program, the participants were spun to 3.5GZ (head to toe) and 6GX (front to back) to simulate the actual flight profile of SpaceShipTwo during a 110km (68 miles) apogee sub-orbital space flight.

Richard Branson Remarks

Welcome, and thank you to everyone who’s come along today.

This is an historic occasion.

Burt has been very reluctant to let anyone in to his factory, especially me, so having seen the footage I am enormously relieved that he has indeed been hard at work building our spaceships for the past two years.

2008 really will be the Year of the Spaceship.

As Will said, we’re tremendously excited about the prospects for this system, and about everything that it will be able to do.

If our new system could carry only people into space, that would be enough for me, because of the transforming effect it will have on the thousands who will travel with us. It is quite clear from every astronaut that I’ve ever spoken to -- including Brian Binnie and Mike Melvill -- that seeing the planet from out there, surrounded by the incredibly thin protective layer of atmosphere, helps one to wake up to the fragility of the small portion of the planet’s mass that we inhabit, and to the importance of protecting the Earth.

One of our prospective astronauts, Professor James Lovelock, who created Gaia theory in the 1970s after his work for NASA, and who had his Eureka moment seeing an image of the planet Earth taken from space, has told me that he thinks that what we’re doing is one of the most important industrial projects of the 21st century .
So before Burt and I unveil WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo, and Burt tells you about how this technology will work, I would like to take a few minutes to talk about why I consider space to be the final frontier that is so essential to the future of civilization on this planet.

It was Stephen Hawking who first got me thinking about this issue, when he explained clearly and concisely to the BBC that mankind had no option but to get to space as quickly as possible and start doing things up there that we have been doing on planet Earth, but in a much more efficient manner.

Our population is now heading to 9 billion people by the middle of this century -- that’s three times more than when I was born. With the end of the oil era approaching, and climate change progressing faster than most models have been predicting, the utilisation of space is essential not only for communications but also for the logistics of survival through things such as weather satellites, agricultural monitoring, GPS and climate science.

I also believe that someday we will be able to use space as a source of energy for the planet, through solar power satellites, using the most sustainable source available – our Sun.

In the unscientific view which people unfortunately sometimes take about the problems we face on this planet, aviation has often been singled out as a key component of climate change.

While, as you know, I believe that aviation has to get much more carbon efficient than it is today, it is important that people begin to realize that seemingly benign industries such as IT have in fact overtaken aviation in terms of their CO2 output.
The explosive growth of the internet has resulted in a world in which we have nearly a half a billion servers, each one consuming hundreds of watts.

Industries like this would benefit enormously from the ability to launch low earth orbit satellites that could literally take some of the heat out of the planet, for example, by serving someday as the repository of our information technology.

So the fact that this system will have the capability to launch small payloads and satellites at low cost is hugely important.

As far as science is concerned, this system offers tremendous potential to researchers who will be able to fly experiments much more often than before, helping to answer key questions about Earth’s climate and the mysteries of the universe.

And for applied research, it is currently just too expensive to be able to do most of the things in space from which industries like biotechnology could really benefit. The beauty of WK2 and SS2 is that they can help change the paradigm of our relationship to space, achieving an era where space accessibility becomes a commercial and scientific norm, rather than an exception.

The other thing that I really admire about the system is that it has the architecture that could someday to be developed into a passenger carrying vehicle, able to take people from A to B around the planet, outside of the atmosphere.
That may not happen for some time, but the first generation of space tourists, many of whom are with us today, will be paving the way as they marvel at the beauty of our planet and experience the freedom of weightlessness and the blackness of space.

Finally, I think it’s very important that we 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. This could rival the scale of investment in the mobile phone and internet technologies after they were unlocked from their military origins and thrown open to the private sector.

So, Burt, congratulations on designing and building a system that will allow thousands of people to realize their dreams and that will act as a catalyst to transform human access to space. In your usual way, you have also managed to create something which is breathtakingly beautiful – so Burt, please come up and join me onstage, and let’s take a look.

Source: By Virgin Galactic