To Infinity and Beyond
Back in the good old days, the Russian Space Agency had monopoly on space tourism, bringing well-healed amateur space explorers to the international Space Station with its Soyuz space craft for a cool USD20-35 million a pop. Now, Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is about to get into the game, and we hear that inflight service is really something to talk about.
Website: www.virgingalactic.com
(article from MAS Going Places Magazine Nov 2010)
The VSS Enterprise was unveiled last December, and today flew for the first time out of Mojave Spaceport in California, as captured in the image above. "VSS Enterprise remained attached to its unique WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, VMS Eve, for the duration of the 2 hours 54 minutes flight, achieving an altitude of 45,000ft (13716 metres)." Both crafts are developed for Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic by Burt Rutan and team at Mojave-based Scaled Composites.
The VSS Enterprise test flights will continue through 2011, progressing from "captive carry" (that's what today's experiment was), to "independent glide," and then fully powered flight, before commercial operations begin.
More photos (in glorious wide-o-vision!) from the dawn liftoff and flight are after the jump.
More about today's flight at VirginGalactic.com
(Photos courtesy Mark Greenberg)
Resource from: http://boingboing.net
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