The cockpits of White Knight and SpaceShipOne are configured identically to one another. Credit: Scaled Composites, LLC
Pushing the envelope
Upon winning the Ansari X Prize in 2004, billionaire
Richard Branson backed Rutan’s winning Tier One
vehicles, base-lining his next generation fleet of
privately developed space tourism craft on them. Virgin
Galactic’s “SpaceShipTwo” and “WhiteKnightTwo” would
continue to be manufactured by Scaled Composites
under “Tier 1b” with Rutan as the Chief Technical Officer.
As with all great engineering endeavours there has
been trial and error in the last ten years and Scaled
Composites is no exception. New designs for the larger
capacity, multi-purpose payload spacecraft and
carriers needed maturation and system redundancies.
Consequently a larger hybrid rocket engine for
SpaceShipTwo was being tested on the ground but on
28th July 2007 a fatal accident occurred injuring others.
The passing of employees Eric Blackwell, Todd Ivens
and Glen May hit the close knit company and Rutan
hard. All production and testing was stopped for a
year while investigations into the accident proceeded.
Findings of probable contamination led to revised
procedures and safety checks for the already safety
conscious company. A stark reminder of the past;
“If we die we want people to accept
it. We’re in a risky business, and we hope
that if anything happens to us it will
not delay the program. The conquest
of space is worth the risk of life”
-Apollo 1 Commander Gus Grissom
Following the accident and investigation, Scaled
Composites returned to work on SpaceShipTwo in 2008
with WhiteKnightTwo making its maiden flight later that
year. By October 2010, SpaceShipTwo began glide test
flights with incremental improvements to the spacecraft,
safety, customer flight experience and ground based
processes. Retaining the same feathering design
lineage of SpaceShipOne, its successor demonstrated
this feature in flight in May 2011. Since that time the
Scaled Composites team have had three successful
rocket powered flight tests of SpaceShipTwo, steadily
pushing the envelope to build a safe spacecraft and a
compliant, sustainable spaceline for Virgin Galactic.
21st century gold rush
SpaceShipOne’s successes not only opened the doors
for Virgin Galactic, but also whet the appetites of those
eager to claim the high ground in the new commercial
race to space. As of 2014, 700 would be astronauts
have signed up for a ride on the new SpaceShipTwo
paying $250,000. The $50 million America’s Space Prize
orbital spaceflight competition ran from 2004-10 and
the X Prize Foundation has teamed up with Google
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