NASA Charters Flights Aboard Virgin's SpaceShipTwo 76
Zothecula writes "Although Virgin Galactic is generally known as a space tourism company, it sees research experiments as a future mission segment and significant business opportunity. To this end, the company has signed a contract with NASA to provide up to three charter flights on its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane. The deal follows the curtain closing on the Space Shuttle program earlier this year and is part of NASA's Flight Opportunities Program, which is charged with providing reduced-gravity environments for research experiments while encouraging the emerging commercial space industry."
In related news, a 68,000-sq. ft. facility has opened in California that will assist in the assembly of SpaceShipTwo spaceplanes.
Re:When they Ask, Where were you. (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh.
Okay, first of all, NASA has been using commercial companies to construct it's rockets for a long time now. The Space Shuttle? Yeah, that was made by Boeing and Lockheed Martin (among others), so it's not like corporations haven't been making basically everything we've put into space already. Same with the Saturn V and I presume most if not all other launch vehicles. They've just been costing us even more because of the combination of government and corporate incompetence (basically, anytime the government contracts out part of it's work to corporations like NASA did, you end up with overpriced and delayed projects. As proof: I offer the entire defense department and it's massive swollen budget. And NASA itself, in part.)
A private company that does everything on it's own is likely to be far (far far) more efficient. Virgin Galactic has already shown this. It's succeed or die for them, while for Boeing (for instance), failure just means more money and a delay. I haven't a clue how you arrived at the conclusion you did. If anything, this makes us less dependent on an individual company. If Virgin fails, we go somewhere else. Free market, bitch. It wasn't a free market before.
Oh, and BTW the other option on the table was to go to the Russians. I'll take an American company long before the Russian government. In a competition of greed and corruption, Russia won about 50 years ago.
Re:When they Ask, Where were you. (Score:5, Informative)
NASA chartered flights to low earth orbit.
And in this case, they didn't even do that; they just chartered ballistic zero-G flights. These SS2 flights replace/supplement the vomit comet, not any of NASA's actual space flight. The fact that the Shuttle was recently retired has nothing to do with this deal at all, and was just a red-herring/troll that should have been cut from the summary.