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Space

20k Down Can Get You Up Into Space 205

Posted by timothy from the bad-credit-no-credit-come-on-down dept.
TheOzz writes "Virgin Galactic announced this week that space tourism will be a reality by 2008. The company is already taking $20,000 deposits for the estimated $200,000 seats on their new spaceships. You can reserve your seat today at the Virgin Galactic web site. The Virgin Group's Branson teamed up with SpaceShipOne builder Burt Rutan to form The Spaceship Company that will build these new commercial spaceships. They are building 9-person spaceships that will carry 7 paying passengers and two crew members, according to space.com. They report that test flights should start in 2007."
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20k Down Can Get You Up Into Space More

20k Down Can Get You Up Into Space

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  • Is that $20k non-refundable?

    I'd like to see what happens to people who put their money down and then can't make the other $180,000, or if the space tourism idea doesn't fly in the end (pun not intended).

    fp?

    • Re:Down payment (Score:5, Informative)

      by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:03PM (#13204229) Journal
      From the web page:

      The first flights are planned to begin in 2008. We are now starting to take reservations and deposit commitments for the first year of operations. The ticket price has been set at US$200,000 and the minimum, fully refundable deposit to secure your spaceship seat is US$20,000.
      • Yea, I can go to the furnature store and they give me stuff for FREE! (No money down, that's the same thing, right?)
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:Down payment (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Free_Meson ( 706323 )
          A well known scam in the US involves taking investment money and buying a home in Florida. Then, once bankruptcy is called, the home that all of the investment is locked up in, gets sold by the individual. As I understand it, even if the court knew this for a fact, it's against law in Florida to seize someones home. A court can pierce the corporate veil in cases of fraud or self-dealing similar to this one, allowing corporate debts to be collected against the owners/shareholders. Also, while many states pr
    • I'd be more worried about the solvency of Virgin Galactic. Giving Beardie a 20k loan to bail out his other interests doesn't seem like a great idea to me.

    • Re:Down payment (Score:5, Funny)

      by Golias ( 176380 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:18PM (#13204298)
      If you are in a place in your life where spending $200,000 to be taken up above the atmostphere for a little while seems like a good idea, you probably don't give a shit about $20,000.

      Note to those who are mere millionaires instead of billionaires: It would be much cheaper and almost as good to get one of your rich asshole friends to take you along for a ride on their Gulfstream V jets sometimes. Those private gets fly high enough that the sky is dark blue in the daytime. Very cool. Plus, there's no need to wear a gay-ass looking space suit.

  • Rate (Score:3, Insightful)

    by northcat ( 827059 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:07PM (#13204244) Journal
    $200,000 for going to space without going out of your ship is fair, but $1 million - 5 times as much - for going near the moon without going out of your ship is unfair?

    • Re:Rate (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      100 million.
  • Just one more thing to do when I win the lottery.

  • Virgin Galactic (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:08PM (#13204250)
    Isn't that a synonym for Slashdotters in Space?

  • Virgin Galactic business strategy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1. Take $20k down.
    2. Invest.
    3. Refund original $20k in 2008
    4. Profit!
    • Even if a thousand people put $20k down, that's $20M, which is pocket change for a large company like Virgin.
      • To make it even better: if 1,000 people took the ride the total revenue would be $200M, which would probably just break even after development and setting up the business. For reference: SS1 cost about $20M, flew only twice, carried only one person, and was virtually certain to kill someone eventually (that's why they retired it - it was more of a learn from mistakes type of craft). This one will have 3x the payload, have to fly many times, and NOT have the primary atitude control system fail...

  • Cheaper (Score:2, Interesting)

    by romka1 ( 891990 )
    Thats much cheaer then the 20 million you have to pay to go on Souz :) But with Souz you get to stay on ISS for a few days

    • Re:Cheaper (Score:4, Funny)

      by darkonc ( 47285 ) <stephen_samuel@b ... m ['n.c' in gap]> on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:20PM (#13204306) Homepage Journal
      Well, if I was rich enough that I could throw away that kind of money, I'd rather spend the $20M to go to ISS. On the other hand, there are a lot more people with $200K to trow away on getting 'into space' than $20M. I know a reasonable number of people with $200K equity that they could pull out of their savings/investments without ending up destitute. The number of people with $20M, on the other hand, I've mostly only seen on the news, or in passing.

      • Re:Cheaper (Score:3, Funny)

        by elyobelyob ( 844203 )
        "The number of people with $20M, on the other hand, I've mostly only seen on the news, or in passing." You're Dr Shipman and I claim my free five pounds ...
    • I'd rather pay 20 million to go up with the Russians. From what I've read of this Virgin Galatic deal is for the 200k you ride up in a ship with 7 other suckers and you must stay strapped into your seat and you are only weightless for like 5-10 minutes. I find this to be a rip-off but I'm sure alot of people will do it, because some poeple have more money than they know what to do with. But for 10 minutes of being in space it's not worth it to me.
    • 20 Millions for Souz now will do nothing for the future. Virgin galatic is trying to do a start-up for getting to space. My guess is that this 9 person craft will go much higher than 60 Miles. The next craft after that, will probably be the one to 300 Miles.
      • Um, no. For why, please read [daughtersoftiresias.org].
        • you keep spaceship one based on the same engine. But nobody will do that. Rutan did it to have a safe, a developmently fast engine. Now comes the fun of creating a new upper stage based on H2/O2 (IIRC ISP of more than 450) rather than butyl rubber (less than 250). Keep in mind that he did not develop the engine. Another group did. He is simply buying those.

          But I totally agree with the article. It is a good one in that many ppl do not realize that Rutan has a long ways to go. But he is committed to the 2 pa

  • In case of a water landing (Score:5, Funny)

    by glazed ( 122100 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:10PM (#13204261)
    Your seat cushion can be used as a heat shield during the rapid descent.
  • Notice anything about their expected demographic?
    I'm suprised there's no HRH and 'Bill Gates' options

  • The real news: Branson and Rutan's new company (Score:5, Informative)

    by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:14PM (#13204276) Journal
    I think the real news here isn't the fact that they're taking deposits (they've been doing this for a while), but that Branson and Rutan have started up a new business, "The Spaceship Company."

    From here [msn.com]:

    But today's announcement reflects a finer appreciation of the financial and regulatory realities. Several months ago, Rutan complained to Congress that U.S. export restrictions [NOTE: These are ITAR restrictions, the same ones which turned this tattoo [treachery.net] of encryption code into a munition a few years back] were making it difficult for the British Virgin Galactic project to move forward.

    The new arrangement restructures the deal: The Rutan-Branson venture, called The Spaceship Company, will license SpaceShipOne's technology from Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the company set up with financial backing from software billionaire Paul Allen and intellectual property from Rutan's Scaled Composites.

    The Spaceship Company will then do the actual building of SpaceShipTwos (or Threes ... or Fours) for Virgin Galactic, and for any other spaceline company that wants a suborbital craft. You can assume that the company is structured so as to avoid running into export roadblocks, while keeping the British financial backer in the loop.

  • What about those PanAm down payments on the moon? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:22PM (#13204318)
    After 2001 debuted, someone at PanAm got smart and instead of hanging up on what they thought were cranks looking for tickets to the moon, they started taking cataloged down payments on the first PanAm flights to the moon...

    One way or the other, I want to visit my one acre on the moon!

  • This is way cool. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BigZaphod ( 12942 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:34PM (#13204361) Homepage
    I'm too chicken (and far, far too poor) to be one of the first people to go on a trip like this, but I'm very happy to see it being done. I'm 25 and have many childhood memories of how space was the future and how someday I'd get to visit the moon (maybe even live there) and all that. Somewhere along the line all of that kind of talk just ended and space faded from people's view. It has indeed been a sad thing to not have some kind of huge bigger-than-seems-possible goal to strive for as a nation or even as a species. I hope this new commercial space industry can bring some of the magic back.

    • Re:This is way cool. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jav1231 ( 539129 )
      I think it's great too. As great as NASA is, they've kind of been slow to find the next leap forward. The Shuttle Program is a great accomplishment but it's become routine almost, recent disaster aside. The ISS is a neat idea but it's kind of stagnant too. Perhaps the private sector can move us along so that we may all have the chance to see Earth from space someday.

    • Re:This is way cool. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kesuki ( 321456 )
      Somewhere along the line all of that kind of talk just ended

      If every penny we spent on the cold war had been spent on a combination of nuclear and space technology we'd be paying 2 cents/kwh for electricity, and we could have built any number of of the potential 'low cost' space sytems, (electro magnetic rail 1st stage booster ramps, or a 'true' space elevator, at the equator) and a full city on the moon, possibly more than one.

      So you see what happened to the dream? we built big weapons to blow the world u
    • I'm 25 and have many childhood memories of how space was the future and how someday I'd get to visit the moon (maybe even live there) and all that. Somewhere along the line all of that kind of talk just ended and space faded from people's view

      I'm 30, and blame the eighties (as any Gen-Xer would!). the Cold War was on, and we were shit scared of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. Reagan proposed the "Star Wars" space-based defense initiative. This grubbied the art, instead of being about romantic

  • Like Pan Am (Score:1, Redundant)

    by blueZhift ( 652272 )
    This sounds like what Pan American airlines did back in the 60s when 2001: A Space Odyssey came out featuring the Pan Am [wikipedia.org] spaceplane. They too sold tickets for future spaceflights. But I guess Virgin has a better chance, perhaps, of fulfilling the promise. And it may help that most probably don't remember what happened to Pan Am either!

  • Canadian Planetspace: public flights within 2 yrs (Score:4, Informative)

    by toby ( 759 ) * on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:42PM (#13204398) Homepage Journal
    Today's Toronto Star [thestar.com] has an article (apparently not online) about the heated competition in "space tourist" ventures, and highlighted the London, Ontario, firm Planetspace [planetspace.org], which believes it could be the earliest to offer public flights.

    Funded by Dr Chirinjeev Kathuria, they see the secret to success as a modernised liquid oxygen/alcohol rocket motor [canadianarrow.com] based on the German V2, which proved its reliability in over 3,000 past flights (more history via that web page). The company uses the Canadian Arrow Space Centre [canadianarrow.com].

  • $200,000?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by MirrororriM ( 801308 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:43PM (#13204404) Homepage Journal
    "The company is already taking $20,000 deposits for the estimated $200,000 seats on their new spaceships. You can reserve your seat today at the Virgin Galactic web site."

    Will they accept a personal check the day of the launch? ;)

  • And where does this go? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Do they actually go into space? Do they orbit? Or do they just do the spaceshipone "we've breached the top of the atmosphere, then come back down! whee!"

  • But do they... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    from the bad-credit-no-credit-come-on-down dept.

    but do they habla español?
  • If I want to see earth from high above I'd use Google Earth... I don't really think its space unless you fly around the moon and the rings of saturn - and fast.. and we can't do that yet.

    It may be one hell of an achievemnt when they launch the space shuttle, but I can't help thinking "what a hunk of junk" when I see it flying - the burden of too many years of scifi I guess...

    • Re:But is it space? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by JeffTL ( 667728 )
      It's not the Sci-Fi that makes the Shuttle look like a hunk of junk.

      It's the memory of the Saturn V and the present-day versatility of the Soyuz (though admittedly Soyuz can't carry as much of a payload as the shuttle).

  • Annoying (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Reality Master 101 ( 179095 ) <RealityMaster101@gmail. c o m> on Saturday July 30, 2005 @06:54PM (#13204442) Homepage Journal
    Am I the only one that's annoyed by this?

    This is not space travel. I don't care that a bunch of geeks in a room defined "space" as 100KM, space travel means CONTROLLED space travel. This is just shooting people really high and letting them fall to earth, at which point it's normal air travel.

    We could fly before the Wright Brothers, but what made their accomplishment noteworthy was that it was controlled, powered flight. This is uncontrolled powered space travel. It's a stunt.

    Space travel means an orbital insertion. Controlled powered space travel.

    Granted, this is a necessary step. I'm glad they're doing it. But I hate all the hype they're putting into this. I'm afraid that people, once they figure out it's a very expensive stunt that isn't really space travel, are going to poison the well for this sort of thing.

    Be honest: Would you really be impressed with someone who rode this thing, other than the fact that they were able to shell out 200 grand? Would you look at them as Astronauts? I wouldn't.

    Bah.

    • Re:Annoying (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mOoZik ( 698544 )
      You know what annoys me more? Geeks like you who dissect every good thing, every litte progress just so you can feel better about the fact that you won't be able to enjoy it, even if it was to "actual" space. No one said this was space travel. However, this [scaled.com] is as good a view as you're gonna get for $200,000. But nooo, it's not good enough for you!

      • If you paid $200,000 for that, you were conned!

        It let me download it for free. It makes a nice desktop wallpaper though.
      • You know what annoys me more? Geeks like you who dissect every good thing, every litte progress just so you can feel better about the fact that you won't be able to enjoy it, even if it was to "actual" space.

        Who says I couldn't do it? It'd be a stretch, but I could do it. But if I'm going to shell out money for space travel, I want SPACE TRAVEL. Not four or five minutes of free fall, but docking with a hotel in space.

        It's a good first step. But did you read the marketing crapola on the Virgin Galactic w

        • Man, you can do that. You just have to pony up $20,000,000 and you get 8 days on the ISS. Is that space travel enough for you? For 1000th the price you get a "sample" of space travel.. for some of us that's worth it. For the rest of us, we have to wait for early adopters to drive down the price. Personally I hope someone buys one of these tickets and raffles it (with permission from Virgin Galactic of course). Then for the price of $20 we can all have a chance of going into space.
      • You know what annoys me more? Geeks like you who dissect every good thing,

        The problem is IT is NOT a good thing, it is piece of shit. It is dissecting a lie really.

      • You know what annoys me more? Geeks like you who dissect every good thing, every litte progress

        Your comment should have been score "-5 Misses The Point".

        His point was, that Spaceship One/Two *isn't* progress - not on the space side of the house anyhow. It's a really, really, neat aircraft - it's not a spacecraft. It's a sideshow - a carnival attraction.

        And a lot of people who should know better having been drooling all over themselves as if it was the Second Coming.

    • Space travel means an orbital insertion. Controlled powered space travel.

      I'll be sure to mention that to Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom.

    • Am I the only one that's annoyed by this?

      For the most part, yes. Of course, this is slashdot, where everybody bitches about everything which isn't Linux.
    • Shooting people really high and letting them fall back to Earth and survive is a lot harder than you seem to think it is.
    • But that's as close as most players will ever get to playing major league.

      A lot of people want to go to space. They'll never qualify for even the equivalent of the minor leagues, in that regard. But they'd still like just a little taste. Why rain on the little game they are able to get together?

      As for being impressed, I'm happy for them that they're taking their dreams as far as they can, instead of sitting around not doing anything and making fun of others. I say that as a friend to someone who's already h

    • Re:Annoying (Score:4, Insightful)

      by demachina ( 71715 ) on Sunday July 31, 2005 @01:02AM (#13205937)
      First off you are totally off base using the word "CONTROLLED" here. SpaceShipOne is totally controlled. It has a pilot that lights the engine and can shut it off. He uses a stick and pedals to steer it. In fact he is more of a pilot than Space Shuttle pilots are. SpaceShipOne has no flight control computers. I think the Space Shuttle's computers could with some tweaking fly an entire mission without astronauts aboard. I suspect it would be dangerous to impossible to fly a Shuttle launch or reentry by the seat of the pants, if the computers all went down. The SpaceShipOne's feathered wing is fantastic innovation that make piloted reentry possible and safe, though of course its not bleeding off as much speed as the Shuttle is coming from LEO.

      I think the subject of your rant is not "control" but duration and maybe velocity. The fact is SpaceShipOne is getting to the same elevation as the lowest of low earth orbits, you will get the same view, its just brief. It just lacks the speed or fuel to stay there. This is exactly like the Wright brothers, their first flights barely left the ground too. With time, more R&D, better engines they increased the duration of their fligths, so will Rutan. The Wright Brothers had to scrape together private funding for their R&D so does Rutan.

      "Would you really be impressed with someone who rode this thing"

      No but I'd be really impressed if I could ride the thing. Its important to note I'm note really impressed with people who ride in the Space Shuttle either, nobody really is. Most of them are just passengers too, and again the flight computers do most of the flying not the "pilot" or "commander" they are mostly flipping switches per a carefully written script. Fact is todays real astronauts are boring, no one knows their names, they are only "heroes" when they get killed.

      I think it would really relight enthusiasm for space travel if LOTS of people could get astronaut wings and we would break down the barrier between ordinary people and NASA astronauts. At this point we NEED for people to realize they can get in to space without doing what astronauts do, devoting their entire life to the pursuit, being an overachiever to the point of being obnoxious, have a high tolerance for bureaucracy(NASA), and be very adept at kissing ass to get to the top of the heap to get a ride.

      Virgin Galactic and Rutan are trying to make the very important step where space travel starts turning in to something more like airline travel and people can buy a ticket and go if they want for fun or if they want to do business there.

      Fact is there just aren't many adventures left in this world. Climbing Mt. Everest has been done so many times its not special any more. Affluent thrill seekers will probably snap this up because its something new. Once it stops being new then there will be the next goal, getting to LEO and to a space hotel, and then beyond.

  • black sky or zero gee? (Score:4, Informative)

    by kylemonger ( 686302 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @07:04PM (#13204490)
    I think what most people want from a trip to space is to muck about in zero gee. If that's the case they could get much more bang for their buck with this [zerogcorp.com]. Just the down payment for Branson's Most Excellent Adventure would buy five of these trips.

  • We know what we're getting into. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Radak ( 126696 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @07:20PM (#13204578) Journal
    Virgin's already got my deposit. I'm going.

    The naysayers can say what they want, but those of who are actually involved and actually paying for tickets are fully apprised of what the spaceship is, where it's going, and for how long.

    It's been my dream ever since I knew space existed to get there, and since I can afford it, $200,000 for a few minutes there is worth it to me.

    No, this isn't controlled orbital insertion, but it is still a flight into space, hence spaceflight, and flights like these are a vital first step toward getting real civilian orbital travel working, and I'll be first in line for that, too. If I have any money left, that is.

    You guys can whine about ballistic space travel not being real spaceflight all you want. I know what it is, I have no doubts about its value to me, and I'm going for a ride on a rocketship!
    • u paid 200,000 for a trip that will last a few minutes. you better justify that.

      I did justify it. I told you I knew what I was paying for and it was worth it to me. What other justification is necessary?

      My point to the naysayers is that Virgin, while good at PR hype, isn't misrepresenting this and they're making the people who are seriously interested fully aware of what they're doing and how they're progressing. To the people like me who think it's worth it, it's worth it. Nuff said.
    • I'm glad to see this. Don't let us (The people without 200k laying about) down by changing your mind.

    • Re:We know what we're getting into. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 30, 2005 @08:17PM (#13204854)
      And we know what you're getting the rest of us into. The eventual lowering of cost for the rest of us to go and continuing developments towards eventual privately built and flown orbital flights.

      NASA does science, they do a pretty good job at it overall (lots of smart people working there doing some pretty amazing things) but to anyone that thinks NASA is really paving the way so that one day you or I might be able to afford a ticket into space is just fooling themselves. It's going to take visionaries and brilliant engineers like Burt Rutan coupled with funding from venture capitalists to get the common man into orbit and beyond. It's people like the above poster that's going to make the initial investments pay off and bring in even more capital, more R&D, and eventually make it possible for the REST of us to get into space and even orbit one day. So my hat's off to not only the engineers and folks taking the financial risk to fund these sorts of projects but also for the folks willing to support the future of private space travel because they can see that their $200k isn't just for a fun/quick stunt, but also goes to help support the future of space tourism (and like ot or not, space tourism is going to be the first primary money making industry that drives the development of privately manned space travel).
    • Virgin's already got my deposit. I'm going.

      That's really cool, and I'm quite envious of you. You'll post pictures for us, right? :)
    • I suppose I could afford to go too if I lived in my parents basement and could save all my money! Sorry, had to bed said. (BTW> i'm jealous)

  • show me (Score:2, Insightful)

    by harkabeeparolyn ( 711320 )
    When Burt Rutan and Paul Allen have the guts to ride that fucker then I'll get in it. If it's such a fun thing why haven't they been up in it yet?
  • I've tried to keep on top of all the developments in private space travel, but I don't really have a good idea of how far along the various orbital projects are.

    Could someone provide some more info on this?
  • I'll wait and get my ticket on priceline.com.

  • Notes on Rutan presentations at EAA Oshkosh (Score:5, Informative)

    by jnhtx ( 87543 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @10:43PM (#13205378) Homepage
    I just got back from the Experimental Aircraft Association convention and flyin at Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

    Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, Richard Branson, Mike Melville, Brian Bennie and a bunch of Scaled Composite and Virgin people were there. Mike Melville flew the White Knight to the show, carrying Mr and Mrs Rutan in SpaceShip One.

    I heard a press conference and no less than six 90 minute talks about Rutan's space program from SpaceShip One and SpaceShip Two principles.

    Here are some more or less random factoids that were discussed in detail at Oshkosh:

    1) The White Knight with attached SpaceShip One were remarkably graceful in flight, far more so than the videos I had seen would have suggested.

    2) Allen said that the cost of the entire SpaceShip One program were about the same as a ride to the ISS on Soyuz, i.e. on the order of $20 million dollars.

    3) Rutan and his people reveled a number of problems that I had not seen in the press prior to this week. For example, on one of the early White Knight flights one of the nose wheels struck a rough spot in the runway during the take off roll. This nose wheel shimmied to the point were the nose wheel detached from the airframe. White Knight had to make a three wheel one stump landing.

    4) The first flight into space exceeded 100km of altitude by only a little more than 100 meters. There was great concern that the motor didn't have sufficient impulse to attain the X-Prize goal of 100km altitude when carrying one human pilot and two passengers or 400 pounds of ballast. They went so far as to buy solid rocket booster motors from Thiokol. In the end they were able to improve the performance of the basic engine without needing these extra boosters. Rutan was coy about exactly how this was done, but the two official X Prize flights did exceed 100Km by comfortable margins. He did mention that engineers from both the winning motor company, SpaceDev of California, and the losing company, EAC of Florida, assisted in improving the motor. They have one more complete motor that was not used.

    5) The maximum temperature during reentry was on the order of 200F. The craft experienced greater heating on ascent rather than descent. This heat was control by 14 pounds of Scaled proprietary thermal protection material on the leading edges of the wing.

    6) Both pilots were effusive in their praise of the "care free" feathered reentry system. They both said that flying the ascent was very demanding, but that during re-entry they had nothing to do except enjoy the ride.

    7) SpaceShip Two will be "one hundred times safer than any previous manned space system" according to Rutan. His goal is to attain a safety level equivalent to the airliners of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

    8) Scaled Composites will design SpaceShip Two. The SpaceShip Company will manufacture the craft, Scaled will test and certify the craft. Spacelines such as Virgin Galactic will purchase and operate SpaceShip Two and its carrier aircraft.

    10) Each SpaceShip Two and carrier will be individually flight tested and certified. This is an approved alternate certification method to that used for mass produced aircraft. By testing each craft individually, they do not have to provide conformity data back to raw materials as is done with airliners.

    11) Rutan anticipates 50 to 100 test flights prior to certification and paid passenger travel. Rutan will fly on some of these flights. In fact, he expects that during the test phase, prior to paid passenger flights, more people will fly into space on SpaceShip Two than have ever flown in space by all other craft.

    11) SpaceShip One flew straight up, and recovered straight down. SpaceShip Two will fly 200 to 300 miles down range. Rutan anticipates that Virgin will launch SpaceShip Two over the Pacific Ocean and recovering it at Mohave. This will provide several minutes of atmospheric flight at Mach 2-3 during ascent and descent, providing a Concorde like experience.

    12) Li
  • but how much to get you down?

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