14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at Virgin Galactic say that the space tourism company will enter a hiatus of sorts during the summer, as far as testing their spacecraft concept goes. During this break, engineers will get ready to begin the next stage of demo flights, before the vehicle becomes operational.
The company is developing the SpaceShipTwo reusable vehicle, which is capable of reaching suborbital altitudes. It will provide several minutes of weightlessness for six paying passengers and two crew members, before returning to land.
This spacecraft will not launch from a rocket, but rather from underneath a carrier aircraft, known as the WhiteKnightTwo. The latter will take the space vehicle high into the atmosphere, where separation will occur. The final leg of the journey will be powered by a rocket aboard SpaceShipTwo.
Until now, Virgin has conducted a large number of tests using this design, including gliding tests to see if the spacecraft can land on its own. But now it's time for experts to move the process even further.
This launch and delivery was designed and built by experts at Scaled Composites. The company, now located at the Mojave Air and Space Port, is currently conducting studies of the data it collected during the glide tests carried out earlier this year.
“The downtime will be dependent on the judgment of Scaled engineers as they process the information gained from the extensive and successful recent flight testing,” Virgin Galactic CEO and president, George Whitesides, told Space in an interview.
During the hiatus, the vehicles will also be updated, to reflect what engineers learn from their analysis of previous flights. During two of the missions, Virgin demonstrated that it's possible to launch the two vehicles in consecutive days, on June 14 and June 15, respectively.
Sources at Virgin say that the next stage in the tests is to install a hybrid motor built by the Sierra Nevada Corporation inside the SpaceShipTwo. That engine is meant to boost the spacecraft to low-Earth orbit after separation from the WhiteKnightTwo.
At this point, the company cannot specify exactly when the first passenger flight will take place. It all depends on how well the two vehicles perform, and on how fast tests will convince authorities to certify the safety of Virgin's operations.
What is known is that one seat on the SpaceShipTwo will set customers back by about $200,000.