Virgin Galactic

05/21/05 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

This session is about Virgin Galactic and their immediate plans.

SpaceShipTwo's altitude goal will be 360,000 feet and possibly 400,000 feet. And passengers will be able to leave their seat and have enough time to move about and look out the window. It will be called “Virgin SpaceShip Enterprise”. And the motherwhip (White Knight 2) will b identical to the Enterprise so that the next set of flight participants can ride up and watch the previous set actually take off. They even want to do parabolic flights using the White Knight 2 to train the fligh participants in zero-g movement before they actually lauch.

They'll be giving participants 5 minutes of weightlessness.

They're asking their initial customers lots of questions to try and characterize the needs and expectations of the market segment:

Their first concern is “when it is going to happen”. They're answer is Spring 2008.

Apparently we would all recgonize a lot of the names in the customer list.

All of the passengers expect a training period but it can't last longer than a week.

The WhiteNight version 2 will b ecalled “Eve” after Richard Branson's mother.

Adrian Reynard (moder expert on composites) is one of their customers.