Suborbital tourism pioneers form manufacturing venture
Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and SpaceShipOne (SS1) developer Scaled Composites are to form a joint venture to manufacture spacecraft for suborbital flight operators. The new concern, The Spaceship Company, will manufacture SpaceShipTwo (SS2) and its carrier aircraft White Knight Two (WK2) – successors to SS1 and its carrier White Knight – as well as associated ground equipment.
“Richard and I share a vision that commercially viable and safe space tourism will provide the foundation for the human colonisation of space,” says Burt Rutan, founder of Mojave-based Scaled Composites.
The creation of The Spaceship Company may also solve UK company Virgin Galactic’s potential problems with US export rules. Virgin Galactic aims to provide a suborbital flight service from 2008. It has ordered five nine-seat SS2s and two WK2s from Scaled Composites. It has an exclusive purchase agreement for the first 18 months that the SS2/WK2 system is operated commercially.
However, export rules mean the US Department of Defense has to approve contact between US entities and foreign organisations where certain technologies are involved, including launch systems. As a minor partner in the joint venture, which must be a US company to satisfy the rules, Virgin Galactic personnel could have fewer problems gaining access to technical information.
Last week Rutan confirmed that the “carefree” re-entry and “cantilevered-hybrid” rocket motor technology used for SS1 will be used for SS2. The technology used for SS1 and SS2 is owned by Mojave Aerospace Ventures (MAV), which is in turn owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
Scaled Composites licenses that technology from MAV for the design and development of SS2. However, The Spaceship Company will own the SS2 designs.
- In early 2006 Steve Fossett will attempt to break the Federation Aeronautics Internationale absolute world record for distance without landing of 40,212km (24,987 miles) in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. That record was set by GlobalFlyer designer Burt Rutan’s Voyager aircraft, flown in 1986 by Richard Rutan. Fossett will fly for around 90h from Salina, Kansas, circumnavigating the globe before crossing the Atlantic to land in London and covering 46,500km.
ROB COPPINGER/LONDON
Source: Flight International
