Space?
Many of those who clamoured (or were given tickets?) for the first flight will have snuffed it by the time the 'SS Branson' does its first proper flight.
Virgin Galactic has won an operator's licence for its re-usable low-orbit vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, from the United States Federal Aviation Administration. As described here, the licence permits holders “... to conduct launches or reentries from one launch or reentry site within a range of operational parameters of launch or …
Time is definitely an issue for the Virgin Galactic program.
One thing the US space program taught us is that the public appetite for sub-orbital trips to space has a very limited shelf-life. I always felt a bit sorry for Alan Shepard in that respect.
Is Richard Brandon planning craft capable of higher or longer trips? Without them I fear this could be just a flash in the pan.
It's not space travel except by the narrowest possible definition: passengers get dragged up to 100km altitude—and then dropped again. The passengers never go into orbit, the vehicle never gets remotely close to actual space travel speeds, and Branson's tosh about 're-entry' is just that: all his little plane is doing is gliding back to ground, facing none of the high energy, high temperature, high pressure challenges of Shuttle or genuine orbital crew return capsules.
Despite bombastic twaddle about technology development, none of Virgin's tech for this stunt-flying will be of much use for real spaceships. Neither the engines nor the airframe nor the materials are of much use for orbital entry and return: they're designed to do one thing only—to try to get some rich imbeciles 100km above ground level, alive, and back again (still alive) so they can stick on their "Lookame, I'm An Astronaut!" badges. No, you're not.
And this is annoying because there are real scientific and engineering challenges—the serious stuff, for grownups—which could use the kind of money Branson is peeing away in the desert. Look at Reaction Engines in Britain, working for years on solid, credible technology, solving critical problems that have a genuine, achievable goal, to put a Single Stage To Orbit plane into operation.
It's a pity that work like RM doesn't get the publicity and the funding that is being poured into Branson's vacuous marketing stunts.
I was going to reply that a fraction of the project would be used on something useful: LauncherOne (200kg to sun synchronous orbit). A short fact check before posting showed that White Knight Two is too small for the current design of LauncherOne, and they will need a 747 instead. Also, the LauncherOne design uses an RP2/LOX engine, not N₂O/HTPB so the two projects have very little in common.
I found about $400M of funding for the up/down joyride, $100M for LauncherOne. I found between $100M and $200M of real funding for Skylon, and promises for $350M that could have arrived, or been trimmed to the funding I did find.
The entire Skylon project was expected to require $12B in 2004 and the current first test flight could be in 2025. I can see why investors are going for cheaper toy projects with a shorter promised delivery date. SLS has currently cost most of $7B, and is expected to reach $35B by 2025. If Alan Bond promised to drop half his budget on states that made space shuttle parts, he could have got all the funding he needed.
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