In a ceremony held on September 19 at the Mojave Air and Space Port, in California, officials from private spaceflight company Virgin Galactic announced the opening of the company's Final Assembly, Integration and Test Hangar (FAITH).
The new structure will house the installations and personnel needed to construct the new WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo aircraft/spacecraft combo systems. The company is planning to use them to take paying customers to low-Earth orbit (LEO).
Virgin Galactic will most likely become the first private company to take its customers on suborbital flights, which provide several minutes of weightlessness. At this point, would-be passengers need to pay $200,000 for a seat of the spacecraft.
Scaled Composites has been Virgin's partner in this endeavor for many years. The company is responsible for building the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft and the SpaceShipTwo space plane.
At FAITH, the company will be responsible for carrying out the last stages of assembling and integrating this system, which has thus far proven to be extremely efficient in a number of test flights.
“The opening of the new facility is an important step on a journey that will culminate in commercial operations at Spaceport America,” Virgin Galactic CEO and president George Whitesides said.
“The modern plant is energy-efficient and will provide ample space for future growth of The Spaceship Company. It can hold two WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft and several SpaceshipTwos at the same time,” the official added, quoted by
Space.
He explained that the hangar itself has a surface area of about 68,000 square feet (6,317 square meters), which is more than enough for the number of spacecraft the two companies expect to construct as they get the facility off the ground.
“We believe there is tremendous possibility for growth in the future,” Whiteside said, adding that the company established to construct additional combo systems is called The Spaceship Company (TSC).
TSC is in fact a joint effort between Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, two companies that collaborated on creating the commercial space system for several years.
“Not only are we welcoming a new neighbor at the Mojave Air and Space Port […] we’re ushering in another phase in the development of commercial space trave. It’s exciting to see the vision becoming a reality,” Scaled Composites president Doug Shane adds.
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