Virgin Galactic, the suborbital recreational “spaceship” company backed by businesses favorite joy-boy Sir Richard Branson has announced a further success in its development of exoatmospheric-excursion flights.
Yesterday a test was successfully carried out whereby a passenger ‘rocketplane’ was dropped from a jet at 45,000 feet, making a glide landing.
"I watched the world’s first manned commercial spaceship landing on the runway at Mojave Air and Space Port and it was a great moment. Now, the sky is no longer the limit and we will begin the process of pushing beyond to the final frontier of space itself over the next year,” Branson enthused.
Branson may have been a little over-enthusiastic in his estimations, because even with the help of the ‘mother ship’ jet, the small Virgin Space Ship lacks the power to reach orbital velocity which would help it remain in space. Instead, the little ships uses a burst of tyre-rubber-and-laughing-gas power to briefly whiz out of the atmosphere, but once that fuel burst has burned out, the little ship will glide back down to earth, as it did yesterday, to land in a “spaceport” in the Mojave desert.
A trip on the Virgin Space Ship, called the Enterprise, will cost around $200,000. Virgin have already been selling tickets, although the first proper test flights are no scheduled until next year.
George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic CEO commented after the flight yesterday, "Our challenge going forward will be to complete our experimental program, obtain our FAA licence and safely bring the system into service."
