Construction On Spaceship Factory Set To Begin In the Mojave 147
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."
Re:long term plans? (Score:4, Interesting)
Orbital flight is still future talk for them. The WhiteKnight/SpaceShipTwo combos can only do sub-orbital flights (around 100 km, half of orbital flight). But they are also quite cheep at $200k. Maybe in a few years they'll offer leo/geo flights too, or maybe even further.
I'm almost done with the Nights Dawn trilogy... (Score:3, Interesting)
.. and P.F. Hamilton likes to include timelines, e.g.
2020 — Cavius base established. Mining of lunar subcrustal resources starts.
2037 — Beginning of large-scale geneering on humans; improvement to immunology system, eradication of appendix, organ efficiency increased.
2041 — First deuterium-fuelled fusion stations built; inefficient and expensive.
2044 — Christian reunification.
2047 — First asteroid capture mission. beginning of Earth’s O’Neill halo.
I'd love to see this story as one of those timeline points...
Re:long term plans? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia says the plan for SpaceShipThree will be point-to-point sub-orbital flights rather than orbital as previously planned. But obviously that's contingent on their continuing success.
I'm truly amazed that they're this far along, I've previously written this stuff off as fantasy but it really is happening. There aren't hovercars but we're almost living in the future.