Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, expects to test fly its first spacecraft beyond the Earth’s atmosphere this year, with commercial suborbital passenger service to follow next year or 2014, company officials said on Monday.
Nearly 500 customers have signed up for rides on SpaceShipTwo, a six-passenger, two-pilot spaceship being built and tested by Scaled Composites, an aerospace company founded by aircraft designer Burt Rutan and now owned by Northrop Grumman.
The suborbital flights, which cost US$200,000 per person, are designed to reach an altitude of about 109km, giving fliers a few minutes to experience zero gravity and glimpse Earth set against the blackness of space.
“In the suborbital area, there are a lot of things to be done. This is an area that has been essentially absent for about four decades,” said Neil Armstrong, who was a test pilot for the 1960s-era X-15 research plane before becoming a US astronaut and commander of the first mission to land on the moon.
“There’s a lot of opportunity,” Armstrong told about 400 people attending the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Palo Alto, California. “I certainly hope that some of the new approaches will prove to be profitable and useful.”
Virgin Galactic is the most visible of a handful of companies developing spaceships for tourism, research, educational and business purposes.
SpaceShipTwo, the first of Virgin’s planned five-ship fleet, has completed 31 atmospheric test flights — 15 attached to its carrier aircraft WhiteKnightTwo, and 16 glide tests, William Pomerantz, Virgin Galactic’s vice president of special projects, said in a speech to the conference.
Preparations for the ship’s first rocket-powered flights are under way at Scaled Composites’ Mojave, California, plant and expected to take place this year.
“We hope to have the rocket motor in the spaceship later this year and start powered flight testing,” Virgin Galactic chief test pilot David Mackay told the conference. “We would like to be the first to do this, but we’re not in a race with anyone. This is not a Cold War-era space race.”
“We flow pretty quickly from first powered flight to first flight to space and then it’s not terribly long from there until we have our first commercial flight to space,” Pomerantz told reporters later.
He said passenger service could begin next year or 2014, depending on the results of the test flights and other factors, such as pilot training.
No one knows what the suborbital spaceflight market might be worth, but Andrew Nelson, chief operating officer of XCOR Aerospace, another aspiring commercial spaceline, put the figure at US$1 trillion.
XCOR, which announced on Monday it had closed a US$5 million round of equity funding, now has enough money to manufacture its Lynx suborbtial vehicle. The company charges US$90,000 for rides.
When asked about the potential impact of a commercial suborbital industry, Armstrong noted that the X-15 program, designed to investigate the problems of high-speed, high-altitude flight and devise possible solutions, helped the US become the world’s largest aeronautical product exporter.
“We’re in an entirely new environment now,” Armstrong said, “with different objectives, different participants, different goals. We can’t imagine all the opportunities that exist.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion