Article Courtesy of the Las Cruces Bulletin
By Todd G. Dickson
When Richard Branson dropped over the edge of the glass-walled balcony of the terminal hangar at Spaceport America Monday, Oct. 17, the danger was more for show to the 800 gathered there for a ceremonial dedication of the 110,152-square-foot facility. But after the champagne and speeches, Branson spent much of his time talking more to the press than to the 150 future passengers, to quell reports of competitors and test flight progress.
Emerging from the rust-colored curving steel doors from the hangar’s south end, Branson was fielding questions from a British journalist. Branson was critical of a report about a competitor – XCOR Aerospace, which is developing a suborbital spacecraft that will take a pilot and a passenger into suborbital space for about $100,000, starting in 2014, flying out from the island of Curacao off the coast of Venezuela.
Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceliner promises to take six passengers to suborbital space for $200,000 a flight from Spaceport America, 45 miles north of Las Cruces. “We’re the only one with a system that has actually gone to space, and we’re the only one with a spaceport facility like this,” Branson said. “People need to think about that before they pay $100,000 to go to South America.”
The reporters – as well as the other journalists and some of the future passengers – tried to pin Branson down on when he would begin flying out of Spaceport America.
The Virgin Galactic system launches its spaceship from midair using a hybrid rocket engine. The jet-powered mothership carrying the spaceship was as much the star at Monday’s event as Branson, but it didn’t perform a rumored glide test to the two-mile-long runway at Spaceport America. The spaceship has only performed glide flights as the new, larger hybrid engines are still being tested.
When asked about when the craft would be flying into space, Branson was only willing to say next year for the first rocket powered flight tests, but wouldn’t say exactly when he would begin flying passengers to achieve the first year goal of taking 500 people to space the first year of operations. Branson may have been hedging because the SpaceShipTwo almost didn’t make the ceremony.
In its 16th glide flight Sept. 29, SpaceShipTwo carried a three-person crew – two pilots and a flight test engineer – and made a clean release from WhiteKnightTwo at high altitude. But instead of taking its usual smooth glide flight, it “dropped like a rock and went straight down,” according to one observer. Springing into action, the crew deployed the ship’s novel feather re-entry system and was able to regain stability to make a safe landing after seven minutes, four minutes sooner than it should have landed. It is the first report of a flight “anomaly” for the liner-sized version of the system that made the first privately developed back-to-back spaceflights in 2004.
George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s chief executive officer and president, told Space.com that this is what flight testing is for and that Scaled Composites – which is creating the spaceliner in Mojave, Calif. – is reviewing the data to find out what happened.
That illustrates why Branson wouldn’t be more firm on the start date for regular flights. Branson told reporters that he couldn’t afford even the marginal failure rate of NASA space flight experience. In essence, Branson plans to conduct many test flights before those passengers are taken to space, with him and his family being the first passengers.
For the British billionaire, creating the spaceliner fleet is “the biggest dream of my lifetime” – and that’s saying something for a man who built an international business venture empire from the humble beginnings of a record store. “I still get goose bumps every time I think that I’m doing this,” Branson said.
Called “Keys to a New Dawn,” the terminal hangar dedication signals that construction is nearly finished on the $32.5 million building, which is designed by URS/Foster + Partners to both be modern and blend in with the surrounding desert. It is LEED certified Gold for its environmental sensitivities and energy efficiencies. Soon, Virgin Galactic designers and interior architects will begin working on making the insides of the hangar as otherworldly and up-scaled as the exterior.
For Virgin’s future passengers, it was a day to stare at the WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo and imagine what that one-hour trip into suborbital space will be like.
One of the newer passengers to put down a deposit on the $200,000 flight is Chandra Jessee of New York, who said she has become a believer that these trips into the upper edge of the planet’s atmosphere will make people more sensitive to the world they live in. “I think it (spaceflight access) can bring the world together,” she said. As she gazed upon the spaceliner and recalled its slow, circling flights overhead earlier, Jessee was clearly taken with the WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. “It’s stunningly beautiful,” she said.
