Seems that dream of commercial space flight is nearing!!! If everything goes well, we should be able to buy ticket to space trip and have fun and come back to our beloved earth.. Just pay 200K and you will be added to the waitlist of 530 already registered for this flight. I don't know how soon they will be able to clear this waitlist. Passenger capacity is 6.. So theoretically if they take one flight per day they could fly 1800 passengers per year (assuming 300 flight days per year) with just one single Galactic spaceship.
Will they take my airline miles? If not, then either I need to start buying lottery or make some couple of millions fairly quickly.. or my company' stock goes to $100 or may be $500 or so.. $100 still won't cut in ;-)
200K!! Wao.. it is lot of money for few hours of fun trip but then I am sure it will be well worth it..
Branson’s tourist spaceship a step closer
Test pilot breaks sound barrier in rocket motor craft
By W.J. Hennigan and Adolfo Flores
Los Angeles Times
British billionaire Richard Branson’s commercial space venture Virgin Galactic got one step closer to carrying tourists into space Monday when a test pilot cracked the sound barrier over the Mojave desert.
For the first time, the company’s SpaceShipTwo engaged its rocket motor, sped to Mach 1.2 and reached 56,000 feet in altitude.
The flight is the latest — and largest — milestone in Virgin Galactic’s testing of technology it hopes to use to carry scores of paying customers into space multiple times a day.
“The first powered flight of Virgin Spaceship Enterprise was without any doubt our single most important flight test to date,” Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, said in a statement. “Today’s supersonic success opens the way for a rapid expansion of the spaceship’s powered flight envelope, with a very realistic goal of full space flight by the year’s end.”
The test flight took place shortly after sunrise Monday beginning on the desert runway at Mojave Air and Space Port, about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles. During the test, SpaceShipTwo was taken to about 46,000 feet by a carrier aircraft and dropped like a bomb.
After a short free fall, test pilots Mark Stucky and Mike Alsbury engaged the hybrid rocket motor, powered by nitrous oxide and a rubber compound, for 16 seconds, at which point SpaceShipTwo reached Mach 1.2 speeds.
The idea of Virgin Galactic routinely taking passengers to space this way was developed by retired maverick aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and his Mojave company, Scaled Composites.
Until now, astronauts have reached space packed tight in a capsule or shuttle attached to a high-powered rocket.
Instead, Virgin Galactic will use a WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft that will fly with the reusable Space-ShipTwo rocket plane under its wing to 50,000 feet, where the spaceship will separate and blast off.
When the rocket motor engages, it will power the spaceship to nearly 2,500 mph and take the pilot — and up to six passengers — to the edge of space, or more than 60 miles above the Earth’s surface.
Once they reach that suborbital altitude, passengers will experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth. Then they will re-enter the atmosphere and glide back to the runway. The price for the experience: $200,000.
Virgin Galactic, founded by Branson, hopes to make its first passenger flight sometime next year from Spaceport America in New Mexico, where the company plans to conduct routine operations. The company said it has taken about 530 reservations for the ride.
The WhiteKnight-Two carrier aircraft, which resembles a flying catamaran because it has two fuselages, and SpaceShipTwo are still in the midst of a test-flight program that will continue in Mojave until Virgin Galactic believes it can begin commercial operations.
Virgin Galactic’s commercial space launch system is based on Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, the world’s first private manned spaceship, which successfully flew a test pilot to space and back three times during 2004 to win a $10 million X-Prizepurse.
