23 January 2008

Virgin Galactic


Virgin Galactic
SpaceShipTwo

NYTimes:

Burt Rutan took the cloak off of his new spacecraft on Wednesday. Mr. Rutan, the creator of SpaceShipOne, the first privately-financed craft to carry a human into space, traveled to New York to show detailed models of the bigger SpaceShipTwo and its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo. “Most people think of going to space as Saturn V or the Space Shuttle,” said Mr. Whitehorn, the company president. But the Rutan model, a descendant of the record-breaking X-15 experimental craft, shows there is another way, he said.

The vehicle is meant to open space to a new generation of spacefarers who are more creative than the classically trained astronauts, Mr. Rutan said. And that will bring with it a new way of looking at space travel, just as personal computing opened up the use of computers from a military and academic tool to something that transformed the world.

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