Construction On Spaceship Factory Set To Begin In the Mojave

angry tapir writes "A production facility that would build the world's first fleet of commercial spaceships is set to begin construction on Tuesday at the Mojave Air and Space Port. The facility will be home to The Spaceship Co, or TSC — a joint venture owned by Mojave-based Scaled Composites and British billionaire Richard Branson's space tourism company, Virgin Galactic."

long term plans?

[Vectormatic]

TFA mentions the factory will produce:
- three white-knight IIs
- five SpaceshipTwos

so, what will happen after these 8 builds? Any plans for spaceshipThree?

Cool stuff though, if branson can build some type of spaceshipthree which does orbital flight en masse, this might be the beginning of true private spaceflight

Private Sector efficiency!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

How long it took NASA to grow to a level where it could launch big rockets! That is the Government inefficiency baby. Look at private enterprise. They launch rockets, even before they build the factory. http://www.lanewsmonitor.com/news/California-Missile-Mystery--Real-Missile-Launch-Or-Jet-Contrail-1289389883/ [lanewsmonitor.com]

Re:long term plans?

[damburger]

100km suborbital is "half" of orbital flight? and this gets modded 'Informative'?

Presumably 'half' is a purely qualitative guess by someone who doesn't understand newtonian mechanics?

Hybrid rocket engines cannot give you the mass fraction to get into orbit. Those lightweight hulls cannot withstand the temperatures associated with re-entry from orbit. TSC isn't going to build an orbital spacecraft any time soon, sorry to burst your bubble.

Re:long term plans?

[Lillebo]

There aren't hovercars but we're almost living in the future.

We're actually not that far away when it comes to hovercars either: DARPA's flying Humvee [goo.gl]

Altitude is irrelevant. We need velocity!

[captainpanic]

Altitude is quite irrelevant. It's velocity we need!

The potential energy of 1 kg at 250 km is 2.5 MJ/kg.
The kinetic energy of 1 kg at 7000 m/s is 25 MJ (10x as much!).
The atmosperic drag adds less than 20% to the energy requirements.

The point I try to make? We need velocity! How fast does that Space Ship go? (No, I didn't RTFA - it may be in there...)

p.s. 100 km is half orbital only because low earth orbit is at about 200 km.

Re:I must be dreaming

[Taxman415a]

Yeah, I think a spaceship factory is kind of cool too, but with a name like Mojave Air and Space Port, I'm really disappointed there's been 30 some comments and no one has made a reference to the "wretched hive of scum and villainy", Mos Eisley. It's even out in the desert southwest where at least one of the far off shots from the film were done.

Northrop

[Cobalt Jacket]

It should be noted that Scaled Composites has been a unit of Northrop Grumman for a couple of years now. With Burt Rutan retiring, it will become more under NGC control. However, NGC does not have a regular rocket launch unit as Boeing and Lockheed does, so there's no reason that NGC will not continue allowing Scaled Composites to prosper.