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Virgin Galactic > Spaceflight for the Rest of Us

Words by Ric Getter
October 2006

It’s nothing like The Right Stuff. You, your flight crew and fellow passengers are dropped off on the flight line wearing light cotton flight suits bearing the eye-like Virgin Galactic logo. The transition from the air-conditioned van to the hot New Mexico sun is uncomfortably abrupt. On the tarmac it’s desert quiet, nothing like Tom Wolfe’s nightmarish scene of whining liquid oxygen tanks and drone of high-pressure pumps.

Sitting quietly in front of you is possibly the most graceful aircraft you’ve ever seen. Its huge wingspan seems to fill your entire field of vision. Its graceful lines and curves look too fragile to fly halfway to space. Under its belly, bearing a maternal resemblance to the ship above is the craft that will, before the hour is out, be carrying you into space.

The scenario is no longer science fiction. Virgin Galactic is planning to have accommodated 50,000 sub-orbital passengers by 2019. To date, over 40,000 potential customers have registered with the company, staking out their place in line for this $200,000 trip of a lifetime. The first passenger-carrying flight could take off as soon as 2008. To accommodate this new business of space tourism, the state of New Mexico made a commitment to build the world’s first commercial spaceport.

The project is the result of a record-setting venture by Burt Rutan, perhaps one of the most brilliant and original minds in aircraft design since the Wright Brothers and Sir Richard Branson, an equally brilliant entrepreneur/adventurer who parlayed a small, mail order record business into one of the most diverse and well-known corporate names in the word.

Rutan’s company quietly became involved with efforts to win the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million challenge to be the first private enterprise to launch a man and the equivalent weight of two other passengers into space (62.5 miles high). To win, the spacecraft had to repeat this feat twice within two weeks. Some folks from Virgin Galactic had a chance to see SpaceShipOne under construction. They quickly made a deal with the project’s primary backer, Microsoft co-founder (and life-long science fiction fan) Paul Allen, to license the technology if it won the competition. On the afternoon of October 4, 2004 SpaceShipOne landed after its second successful flight and claimed the prize. Now, Rutan and Sir Richard are poised to forever change the world of spaceflight.

Even though you’ve been watching the runway roll by just a couple of feet under your window, the reality of where you are and what you’re doing doesn’t really sink in until you feel the afterburners on the White Knight’s two turbojet engines ignite and you pitch up into a steep climb. The sound and the feeling is nothing like you’ve ever experienced in an airliner. Even though it seems like the ground is falling away from you at incredible speed, the ascent to just under 50,000 feet will take over an hour. Suspended under the thin and graceful ninety-foot wings of your mother ship, the ride is remarkably smooth. Slowly, the sky turns a deeper and deeper blue and the horizon moves further away. But this won’t compare with what is to come.

It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to liken the team of Branson and Rutan to the other duo who started a small, Silicon Valley computer company back in the late 70’s. Branson can safely be called an entrepreneurial genius. He is a fearless (but far from reckless) risk-taker whose occasional setbacks only seemed to drive him harder towards success. Starting in the record business, his Virgin brand name has found its way onto everything from airliners to mobile phones to soft drinks. It seems that the concept of a “core market” never quite found its way into his vocabulary. Having given Great Britain its most internationally recognizable brand name since Rolls Royce, Richard Branson was knighted in 1999.

As an aeronautical engineer and designer, it would be unfair to say that Burt Rutan thinks outside the box. One glance at the many remarkable aircraft that went from his drawing board to the runway and to the record books and you’ll realize that he rarely acknow-ledged the fact that a box even existed. At the root of his designs is his commitment to super-strong fiber composite materials as opposed to the more common metal alloys used in most aircraft. They are responsible for the incredibly high performance, lightweight and unbelievably graceful designs that have rolled out of Scaled Composites’ hanger at the Mohave Airport.

It’s about to happen.
Over your headset, you can hear your pilot and the mother ship going through their pre-launch checklist. There’s a short countdown, you fall out of the shadow of the mother ship, and sunlight pours into the cabin. Seconds later, you hear the roar of the rocket engine and you’re pressed back into your seat by the most powerful feeling of acceleration you’ve ever experienced as the rocket pushes you to three and a half times the speed of sound. The blue sky turns to indigo, then darkens to black and fills with stars that appear as unblinking pinpoints of light. Out your window, you can clearly see the curvature of the earth and can make out the Baja Peninsula and Pacific in the distance. The view reaches out over a thousand miles.

When the one-minute burn is complete, the engine abruptly cuts off and everything becomes perfectly silent and perfectly still. The earth is still falling away from you, but there is no sensation of movement. In fact, you realize that the only thing holding you in your seat are your harnesses. You’re weightless.

As a spacecraft, SpaceShipOne is ingeniously simple. The engine is a unique solid/liquid hybrid. A tank of liquefied nitrous oxide (yes, “laughing gas”) feeds a solid rocket motor filled with a rubber-like compound. The combination is far less toxic and far easier to handle than conventional rocket systems. When the pilot ignites the rocket motor, the spacecraft becomes a hypersonic projectile. In space, small thrusters, the reaction control system (RCS), adjusts the SpaceShip’s attitude. When it looses momentum, gravity will pull it back down to earth.

Re-entry is nothing like the fiery inferno of conventional spaceflight. The light-weight composite materials and some truly brilliant design work let the SpaceShip take a very different approach.

With a few deft pops from the RCS, the pilot points SpaceShip’s nose back to earth. You hear the whine of hydraulic pumps telling you that the rear half of the wings and entire tail section are folding upward at a 90-degree angle. Like a bird landing on cupped wings, you gently settle into the upper atmosphere. As you get lower and the sky above begins to return to a familiar shade of blue, the wings fold back down and you continue the long glide back to the spaceport. You are now an astronaut and, as one of history’s first space tourists, you’ve joined the ranks of aviation pioneers.