14 DAY TRIAL // The direct descendant of the X Prize winner of 2004 SpaceShipOne has been revealed yesterday at New York, and it seems that the design phase took some unexpected twists. Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane will be carried and dropped at altitudes of about 15 kilometers into the Earth's atmosphere with the help of the WhiteKnightTwo airplane. However, the WhiteKnightTwo airplane will have two passenger cabins identical to that of the suborbital plane, instead of just one, as it was presented in the original project.
After being flown to the required altitude by the WhiteKnightTwo, the SpaceShipTwo will be released and will fire its hybrid rocket engine that will take it to heights of about 110 kilometers. SpaceShipTwo will most likely carry eight people on board, two pilots and six passengers, and the trip will probably cost 200,000 U.S. dollars per person. People are already crowding to make reservations for future suborbital flights. More than 100 have already subscribe, and the aircraft's designer estimates that it will quickly reach one thousand.
Works on the SpaceShipTwo plane are about half way, while the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft is 80 percent complete and should be ready for tests by the end of this year. Virgin Galactic's project has been lagging behind for a long time, mostly due to the accident at the Scaled Composite Mojave testing facility which claimed the life of one, and triggered a series of investigations related to the SpaceShipTwo hybrid rocket engine.
Thus, the aircraft will probably start its suborbital flying program somewhere in 2009-2010. British billionaire Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic, says he will take his 89 year old father, Edward Branson, into a suborbital flight with SpaceShipTwo, although Edward hasn't followed the astronaut training program yet. Neither did 80 percent of the other people that already subscribed for the program. They must be capable of sustaining a 3.5 G acceleration while flying on the way up, and about 6 G as the plane comes back to the Earth's surface.
So far, out of the people that followed the astronaut training, only 7 percent dropped from the program due to health related problems.
Will Whitehorn, president of Virgina Galactic argues that the WhiteKnightTwo airplane could be easily modified to be adapted for carrying satellites into the Earth's orbit, and even for commercial passenger flights. If SpaceShipTwo will be successful in its suborbital flight, Virgin Galactic may go down in history as the first company that has made commercial space flight possible.
