posted January 24, 2008 08:31 AM               

If space programs has spaceships like Star Wars, I'm sure interest would go up a notch (well, at least mine! )

posted January 24, 2008 03:51 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by John Youskauskas:
...but the cockpits are offset quite far from the centerline of the vehicle.

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posted January 24, 2008 04:03 PM               

Anyone know what it is I'm babbling about?

Cheers,
Matt

posted January 24, 2008 04:16 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Matt T:
German WWII plane where the cockpit was offset across the wing from the fuselage.

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posted January 25, 2008 12:34 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Robert Pearlman:
Is WK2 the first aircraft to have its pilot significantly offset from the centerline?

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posted January 25, 2008 07:42 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Robert Pearlman:
Is WK2 the first aircraft to have its pilot significantly offset from the centerline?

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posted January 26, 2008 06:21 PM               

LiveScience Blogs: Space Ship Two: Eerily Familiar...

And, for some of my aeronautically knowledgeable friends, it was deja vu all over again. Like: "where have we seen this before?" It was downright ghostly:

Take a look at this design – circa 1979 or so – from the Russian Myasishchev Design Bureau as modeled by aerospace scholar Alex Panchenko.

It's an extreme makeover of the Russian Air Force’s 3M bomber (aka the "Bison") which had been in service since 1955.

posted January 27, 2008 04:09 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by cspg:
Regarding WK2, design-wise, some inspiration from DHC-4A Caribou (W-shaped wing) and BAe-146 for the wing-mounted engines on both sides?

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posted January 27, 2008 04:22 AM               

And if they didn't look to Jane's, then they looked farther east (Myasishchev Design Bureau), as illustrated by the post above!

posted January 28, 2008 01:44 PM               

Flying off centerline is not all that hard. Many years ago I was doing touch & goes with another plane. Mentality we would pretend to have half the runway. We were just fooling around, and you would have to have quite a bit of trust in the other person. but once you got it into your head that you HAD to land on the left side of the runway it was no big deal. I won't say were it was (for fear of the law). But it was a wide runway.

posted January 29, 2008 01:14 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Lou Chinal:
Flying off centerline is not all that hard.

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posted March 11, 2008 05:43 AM            

Edited: I've looked at the Virgin Galactic brochure and it looks like a bird, Wright Flyer, Spirit of St. Louis, Bell X1, 747, Lunar Module, SS1.

Any comments on this choice of aviation milestones?

nature, first flight, first transatlantic solo flight, first supersonic flight, most successful airliner, first moon landing, first private space flight.

I think the 747 should have been replaced with Vostok 1.

posted March 11, 2008 10:01 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by tegwilym:
No big deal. Most of my students can never land on the centerline anyway. Then I take them to a narrow runway and they hit it every time!

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posted July 27, 2008 10:18 AM               

Only White Knight Two will be unveiled at Monday's rollout, expected to be attended by politicians, government regulators and space tourism customers. Flight testing is slated for the end of September after ground tests in August.

Meanwhile, SpaceShipTwo is only about 70 percent complete, said Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn.

posted July 28, 2008 10:55 AM               

Virgin Founder, Sir Richard Branson and SpaceShipOne designer, Burt Rutan, today pulled back the hangar doors on the new WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) carrier aircraft that will ferry SpaceShipTwo and thousands of private astronauts, science packages and payload on the first stage of the Virgin Galactic sub-orbital space experience.

The rollout represents another major milestone in Virgin Galactic's quest to launch the world's first private, environmentally benign, space access system for people, payload and science.

Christened "EVE" in honor of Sir Richard's mother, who performed the official naming ceremony, WK2 is both visually remarkable and represents ground-breaking aerospace technology. It is the world's largest all carbon composite aircraft and many of its component parts have been built using composite materials for the very first time. At 140 ft, the wing spar is the longest single carbon composite aviation component ever manufactured.

Driven by a demanding performance specification set by Virgin Galactic, WK2 has a unique heavy lift, high altitude capability and an open architecture driven design which provides for maximum versatility in the weight, mass and volume of its payload potential. It has the power, strength and maneuverability to provide for pre space-flight, positive G force and zero G astronaut training as well as a lift capability which is over 30% greater than that represented by a fully crewed SpaceShipTwo. The vehicle has a maximum altitude over 50,000 ft and its U.S. coast-to-coast range will allow the spaceship to be ferried on long duration flights.

An all carbon composite vehicle of this size represents a giant leap for a material technology that has already been identified as a key contributor to the increasingly urgent requirement by the commercial aviation sector for dramatically more fuel efficient aircraft. Powered by four Pratt and Whitney PW308A engines, which are amongst the most powerful, economic and efficient available, WK2 is a mold breaker in carbon efficiency and the epitome of 21st century aerospace design and technology.

The twin fuselage and central payload area configuration allow for easy access to WK2 and to the spaceship for passengers and crew; the design also aids operational efficiencies and turnaround times. WK2 will be able to support up to four daily space flights, is able to carry out both day and night time operations and is equipped with a package of highly advanced avionics.

Large numbers of VIP's, media and more than 100 fully signed-up future Virgin Galactic astronauts flew into Mojave for the rollout onboard a new Airbus A320 aircraft specially chartered from Virgin America, the youngest and most efficient US domestic airline, which launched to great acclaim in 2007.

Rutan's Scaled Composites facility has been strictly out of bounds whilst design and construction has been underway, but guests today were additionally given a tantalizing preview of SpaceShipTwo, clearly visible but heavily shrouded and well on its way to completion, in the smaller of Scaled's two hangars awaiting its own rollout in 2009. This will be scheduled once WK2 is at the appropriate stage in its extensive test program, which has already begun with ground tests; it is expected to take its first flight in the fall of 2008. The flight test program will be comprehensive even before SpaceShipTwo is carried as a payload for the first time in 2009.

Commenting on the rollout, Burt Rutan, Founder of Scaled Composites said:

"WhiteKnightTwo represents the apogee of the application of carbon composites to aerospace and all of us at Scaled are tremendously excited at the capabilities of the Mothership for SpaceShipTwo. I believe the vehicle will be developed and sold for a variety of launch applications beyond the initial requirements of our launch customer, Virgin Galactic. We have set up a new business jointly with Virgin, The Spaceship Company (TSC), to develop these vehicles and we very much hope that its efficiency will herald a wake up call to the aerospace industry and the necessity of using new materials and technologies in the future. "

Sir Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Galactic added:

"As usual, Burt and the Scaled team have created a beauty and this is a very proud day for us all. The rollout of WhiteKnightTwo takes the Virgin Galactic vision to the next level and continues to provide tangible evidence that this most ambitious of projects is not only for real but is making tremendous progress towards our goal of safe commercial operation.

Virgin Galactic is central to our ambition at Virgin to become the world's leading group in the operation of energy and environmentally efficient transportation, in the air, on the ground and in space. We arrived here this morning on an aircraft operated by Virgin America, who run the most fuel efficient commercial fleet in the US, to roll out what by most definitions, is the most energy efficient aircraft in history. We are naming it EVE after my Mother, Eve Branson but also because it represents a first and a new beginning, the chance for our ever growing group of future astronauts and other scientists and payload specialists to see our world in a completely new light. I for one can't wait!"

posted July 28, 2008 10:59 AM               

Welcome and thanks again for coming today. This is a big moment for us and I think you will agree that WhiteKnightTwo or "EVE" as we will be able to officially call her soon, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary aviation vehicles ever developed.

If our new system could carry only people into space, that would be enough for me, because of the transforming effect it will have on the thousands who will travel with us. It is quite clear from every astronaut that I've ever spoken to -- including Buzz Aldrin and Brian Binnie who are both here today amongst several other astronauts -- that seeing the planet from out there, surrounded by the incredibly thin protective layer of atmosphere, helps one to wake up to the fragility of the small portion of the planet's mass that we inhabit, and to the importance of protecting the Earth.

One of our prospective astronauts, Professor James Lovelock, who created Gaia theory in the 1970s after his work for NASA, and who had his Eureka moment seeing an image of the planet Earth taken from space, has told me that he thinks that what we're doing is one of the most important industrial projects of the 21st century .

So before Burt tells you more about how this technology will work, I would like to take a few minutes to talk about why I consider space to be the final frontier that is so essential to the future of civilization on this planet.

It was Stephen Hawking who first got me thinking about this issue, when he explained clearly and concisely to the BBC that mankind had no option but to get to space as quickly as possible and start doing things up there that we have been doing on planet Earth, but in a much more efficient manner.

Our population is now heading to 9 billion people by the middle of this century -- that's three times more than when I was born. With the end of the oil era approaching, and climate change progressing faster than most models have been predicting, the utilisation of space is essential not only for communications but also for the logistics of survival through things such as weather satellites, agricultural monitoring, GPS and climate science.

I also believe that someday we will be able to use space as a source of energy for the planet, through solar power satellites, using the most sustainable source available - our Sun.

In the unscientific view which people unfortunately sometimes take about the problems we face on this planet, aviation has often been singled out as a key component of climate change.

While, as you know, I believe that aviation has to get much more carbon efficient than it is today, it is important that people begin to realize that seemingly benign industries such as IT have in fact overtaken aviation in terms of their CO2 output and seeing WhiteKnightTwo in reality sends the message that aerospace really can become much more efficient than other forms of transport or indeed entire other industries and at the same time, help them improve their environmental footprint.

The explosive growth of the internet has resulted in a world in which we have over half a billion servers, each one consuming hundreds of watts.

Industries like this would benefit enormously from the ability to launch low earth orbit satellites that could literally take some of the heat out of the planet, for example, by serving someday as the repository of our information technology.

So the fact that this system will have the capability to launch small payloads and satellites at low cost is hugely important.

As far as science is concerned, this system offers tremendous potential to researchers who will be able to fly experiments much more often than before, helping to answer key questions about Earth's climate and the mysteries of the universe.

And for applied research, it is currently just too expensive to be able to do most of the things in space from which industries like biotechnology could really benefit. The beauty of WK2 and SS2 is that they can help change the paradigm of our relationship to space, achieving an era where space accessibility becomes a commercial and scientific norm, rather than an exception.

The other thing that I really admire about the system is that it has the architecture that could someday to be developed into a passenger carrying vehicle, able to take people from A to B around the planet, outside of the atmosphere.

That may not happen for some time, but the first generation of space tourists, many of whom are with us today, will be paving the way as they marvel at the beauty of our planet and experience the freedom of weightlessness and the blackness of space.

Finally, I think it's very important that we make a genuine commercial success of this project. If we do, I believe we'll unlock a wall of private sector money into both space launch systems and space technology. This could rival the scale of investment in the mobile phone and internet technologies after they were unlocked from their military origins and thrown open to the private sector.

So, Burt, congratulations on designing and building a system that will allow thousands of people to realize their dreams and that will act as a catalyst to transform human access to space. In your usual way, you have also managed to create something which is breathtakingly beautiful. At this point I would like to hand over to you to tell us a bit more about your baby.

posted August 05, 2008 10:43 AM               

Today on Boing Boing tv, we're joined by astronaut and American hero Buzz Aldrin, Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson, Scaled Composites founder Burt Rutan, and other space luminaries for an exploration of private space travel -- the technology, the science, and the human experience.

We fly to the Mojave spaceport to witness the unveiling of WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft that will carry SpaceShipTwo and passengers on Virgin Galactic suborbital space flights.