My brain keeps parsing "Virgin Galactic" as...
"Virgin Catholic..."
I think either I need to get a p2p client with better spam filters soon or else take this opportunity to sell something to a casino via eBay?
Designs for SpaceShipTwo displayed in New York
New designs for Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane and the WhiteKnightTwo mothership were unveiled in New York today, supposedly bringing commercial space travel once step nearer. Richard Branson, the man behind Virgin Galactic, hopes that with this design he will be the first to offer paying passengers a trip into …
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Thursday 24th January 2008 08:43 GMT b166er
Expensive?
I think the price is cheap, compared to how much it has taken to get things off the ground.
How long at that rate before Paul Allen and Richard Branson recoup their investment?
Sure, Virgin gets some healthy PR from it, but still. It's a great legacy for both of them, though perhaps a greater one would have been fixing Africa.
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Thursday 24th January 2008 10:19 GMT andrew checkley
For Sale
34 Year old female. (Perfect Wife)
£100k
Excellent cook, Great in bed and really knows how to make her man feel special.
Makes an brilliant pack lunch for when you leave for work on those cold early mornings and often bakes a cake to add that little somthing else to your daily lunch.
Genuine reason for sale. Urgently require to raise funds for research into how great is must be for average joe to experiance space!
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Thursday 24th January 2008 12:38 GMT Paul Brandon
@Whatever
You have to start somewhere, in the commercial world you don't risk going for the big one straight away. This opens up an oppurtunity to far more people (even if they need thousands) and a potential revenue stream that will pay for Tier 2, which is believed to be an Orbital craft on Scaled Composites drawing boards. Which will be infinitely more expensive due to the re-entry problems they'll have to solve when moving at orbital speeds. Besides once sub-orbital is proved it'll bring more investment. So it's a start and they're getting somewhere!
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Thursday 24th January 2008 14:42 GMT Graham Bartlett
@1908: flight and space-flight
Be nice if it happens, Jeff. Trouble is that by 1908 most of the really tough questions had already been answered. Cayley had sussed the wing side, and Benz and co had sussed the engine side. All that needed doing was bolting the two together, which is why the Wright brothers were just one of many.
Problem right now is that the development of the basic components is still "rocket science". Maybe it wouldn't have been if NASA had done the sensible thing and used Apollo as the basis for their next-gen platform. Instead they went for the Space Shuttle to keep the air-force generals happy, and left all their working tech to rust. That's why NASA are now having to reinvent the Apollo wheel, because everything they've done in spaceflight for the last 25 years has been a pointless waste of time and only worked because of vast government spending.
On the plus side though, it's the reason there is private spaceflight (notably Ariane and other major lifters), because no government managed to make a decent job of it. And it's why SS2 and its successors are likely to clean up, because again they're driven by making it work in a cost-effective way. NASA couldn't recognise cost-effective if it beat them over the head with a foam mallet labelled "stick to your budgets"...
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Thursday 24th January 2008 22:37 GMT Rich
Not so much the re-entry
That's the barrier to orbital flight, but the immense amount of fuel you need to launch even the lightest payload. There's a reason why a Saturn V's a big bastard.
Also, there is the related problem of achieving acceptable failure rates for passenger flight with that much energy around.
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Tuesday 29th January 2008 12:07 GMT andrew checkley
By Jimbo
"Well things will surely move on quicker once space has a commercial purpose, lets face it once any thing is commercialised it goes bonkers and more insane investment will happen...
25 years later we will be on Mars! Just who gets the first Virgin or Nasa"
Hmmm prehaps i should start looking for Wife 2.0 to fund my trip to mars!
Ebay could make this process so much easier for me if they stopped removing my listings!
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
