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."

I must be dreaming

[Sockatume]

Headlines like that give me goosebumps.

Your doing it wrong

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Yawn. Wake me when they start building an orbiting spaceship factory.

Re:long term plans?

[jollyreaper]

[quote]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.[/quote]

What's also nice is this approach seems more realistic, each stage of the process intended to generate a positive cashflow, the profits being rolled into the next stage. Too many of these projects try to do everything at once and never even get off the ground. So to the naysayers who go waa waa, this thing's only sub-orbital, just wait another generation or three.

Re:long term plans?

[delinear]

I never really thought about it before, but surely the war on terror has killed the hover car as anything but a plaything for the super rich. Can you honestly imagine our twitch-reaction governments allowing people to fly around in cars? I can't even board a plane that someone else is flying without letting them pat-down search me and look in my shoes.

Re:Private Sector efficiency!

[alen]

the government did this first in the days when supercomputers were less powerful than iphones and droids. back then the engineers had to actually do the math by hand and test everything via trial and error

Stop complaining

[yodleboy]

Hey, can we stop complaining already? NASA and the rest of the space "industry" has had 50 years to make the geek dream of going into space possible for the (more or less) common man. Sub-orbital still counts as space, although it would seem it's not "enough" space for some.

NASA's manned program hasn't done much more than allow a select few to pedal circles around the planet since the end of Apollo. Sure, there were some amazing developments and innovations from that, but the act of getting to orbit? Who cares? You did that 50-ish years ago as well. The shuttle should never have gotten off the ground, and certainly should have been mothballed after Challenger. It was obvious by then that the program was vastly more expensive than expected anyway. All those satellites would have still gone up on conventional rockets, and much of the science could have been sent up in automated labs.

Imagine what 10 or 15 years of the manned spaceflight budget going into finding some other way into orbit might have produced. There have been proposals and ideas for decades, but with the shuttle eating up most of the budget, there was never the funding to really TRY. Sure it may have produced nothing at all (unlikely i think), but we'll never know.

Not trying to sound like a NASA hater, I love space and spaceflight. What I don't love is trillions of dollars spent to go in circles and make work for the astronaut corps.

Shouldn't it be called 'shipyard' ?

[macson_g]

Shouldn't it be called 'shipyard' instead of 'factory'?

Re:I'm almost done with the Nights Dawn trilogy...

[kevinNCSU]

I'm not Catholic but why would the Vatican need to revise positions based upon the discovery of other earth-like planets? Haven't they been saying for a awhile now that it's entirely possible other intelligent life could exist? One would assume intelligent life would likely come from some sort of habitable planet right? Or is there some fine grained difference between allowing for the the possibility of intelligent life and allowing for the possibility of earth-like planets that I'm missing?

Re:long term plans?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily a Tea Party activist. One Google result called him a libertarian.

Re:Economic Stimulus

[geekoid]

we could also spend 50 billion fixing the Katrina disaster, which would create 10's of thousands of jobs. It would have the side benefit of having that area look like cit's in a civilized country.

Of course, in a country where that part of the country complains the feds aren't helping, and ALSO complains the government is 'too big'* so they vote republican**. Maybe they deserve to live in squalor.

*what the hell does that even mean?

**which makes no sense because for 50 years spending has alway gone up signifigantly during pub control. Look it up.