USA: Sir Richard Branson unveils designs of two aircraft designed to take tourists into space

Record ID: 785438

  • Title: USA: Sir Richard Branson unveils designs of two aircraft designed to take tourists into space
  • Date: 24th January 2008
  • Summary: (W1) NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES (JANUARY 23, 2008) (REUTERS) SIR RICHARD BRANSON, FOUNDER OF THE VIRGIN GROUP AND BURT RUTAN, CEO OF SCALED COMPOSITES, UNVEIL MODELS OF TWO CRAFTS FROM VIRGIN GALACTIC THAT WILL BE USED TO TAKE TOURISTS INTO SPACE MODEL OF THE SPACESHIPTWO FROM VIRGIN GALACTIC AND BRANSON POSING FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS WITH RUTAN
  • Embargoed: 8th February 2008 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Usa
  • Country: USA
  • Topics: Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky,Space
  • Reuters ID: LVA8FTRJ5EYB62O9MGB6RQ7GD6PE
  • Story Text: British billionaire Sir Richard Branson hails 2008 the "year of the spaceship" as he unveils the designs for two aircraft which could help take tourists into space.
    The countdown is on for the first regular paying citizen passengers to rocket into space. British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, along with aerospace design guru Burt Rutan on Wednesday (January 23) unveiled models of SpaceShipTwo and its accompanying mothership White Knight Two -- caraft which aim to to carry 6 passengers along with 2 pilots into space.
    The work on these two crafts is nearing completion and flight tests will begin later this year.
    At the unveiling at the Museum of Natural History in New York, Branson expressed a vision of space travel that seems limitless. He believes private space travel could help to answer key questions about Earth's climate and the mysteries of the universe.

    "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," he said.
    A Virgin Galactic spokesperson emphasized that more than 200 people had joined the firm's cadre of future astronauts, 80 have been through their medical assessment and centrifuge training and 30 million dollars had been received in deposits by the company.
    SpaceShipTwo is the follow up to the Burt Rutan designed SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X prize for privately funded space flight back in 2004.
    Rutan says privately funded space travel allows for innovation and risk taking no longer seen at NASA. But last year, as Rutan's company Scaled Composites worked on a design for a rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo in the Mojave desert, there was a blast that killed three workers and injured three more. The event raised questions about the safety of private development of spaceships.
    In response to a question about the accident, Rutan said, "We had a detonation that we don't know yet exactly what caused it, okay? And because of that we are working very closely with not just the government folk and so on but we are also working with people from aerospace, prime rocketry manufacturers, we're bringing in a lot of consultants to help us determine this."
    The White Knight Two mothership, believed to be the world's largest all-carbon composite aircraft, is expected to begin flight testing in the summer and SpaceShipTwo is almost 60% complete. The space trips will leave from a launching pad to be built in New Mexico, and are expected to last a total of two and a half hours. Passengers will be weightless for about 5 minutes. Trips will cost about 200-thousand dollars each. That's far less than the 20 million reported cost of businessman Dennis Tito on a Russian Spacecraft in 2001, considered the first space tourist.
    Future astronauts are already in training and looking forward to the adventure. Jean Reis, a pilot from Luxembourg said, "in the curriculum of a pilot, it's sort of the ultimate thing to do, is to go even higher. You want to go in aviation always higher and always further and then on top of that, I believe strongly we are at the dawn of a new industry."
    Another future astronaut, Natasha Pavlovich from the former Yugoslavia, said that because of the training she was undergoing she did not feel that the process of going into space will be difficult or scary.

    "(In) actual training in the centrifuge...we withstood 3 and 6 G simultaneously and we flew the whole profile of the flight, so when you know what you are getting into, it's not as difficult or fearful," she said.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2011. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
  • Usage Terms/Restrictions: Audio restrictions: This clip's Audio includes copyrighted material. User is responsible for obtaining additional clearances before publishing the audio contained in this clip.
Register