About the challenges in flying the SpaceShipTwo, the waiting list and the fate of the reality show "The Space Race"
Following the crash of the Virgin Galactic space plane yesterday, the WIRED website published An article describing the course of the flight and landing.
At a press conference held today, Saturday in California, Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson announced that he would continue the space tourism initiative despite the fatal accident.
Branson said he was shocked and saddened but would continue to insist. Virgin had hopes of starting commercial launches in 2015, about 700 people have already paid and booked seats and Branson himself said he would take off with his family on the first flight. Branson also announced that he would cooperate with the investigating authorities.
Manual flight
According to the specifications published by the plane's manufacturer Scaled Composite and the Virgin Galactic company, the plane is not equipped with flight control computers or an autopilot. Upon re-entering the atmosphere, a stabilization system brings the plane to an angle suitable for horizontal gliding to the landing track, and this is done manually by hovering without engines, as the space shuttle landed in the past.
Pilots only have one chance to land on the runway successfully, and there is no option to go around and correct. Therefore, the pilots chosen by Virgin Galactic are veteran test pilots of the Air Force and NASA, experienced in flying many aircraft models. The vast majority of the training is done in a simulator due to the complexity of a real training flight, and some in the plane carrying the spacecraft (the WhiteKnightTwo) whose systems and cockpit are similar to those of the space plane.
Long waiting list
Whereas The PHYS.ORG website adds that Over 500 people (another site reported even 700) have already reserved seats on the future flights, and paid the company an advance on account of the ticket price - 250 dollars for a suborbital flight of a few minutes aboard Spaceship-2, which is planned to carry six passengers.
Among the registrants are many celebrities including the actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. In May of this year, the Titanic star held an auction for an invitation to join him on a journey into space and raised 700 thousand euros.
It was also reported that the crash of the Virgin Galactic spacecraft puts the reality show "The Space Race" in question. The series, which began work last year, pits competitors against each other with the prize being a flight on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft.
Richard Branson, owner of the Virgin Group, purchased a license for the technology used by SpaceShipOne, the first model in the series built by Scaled Composites, owned by aviation entrepreneur Brett Rutan. Branson decided to bet on space after the spacecraft SpaceShipOne She won the Ansari X Prize in the amount of 10 million dollars. The award was given to her after she became the first manned private spacecraft to fly into space twice in two weeks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idXE0mNtWXA
- More on the subject on the science website
Summary of Operation SPACESHIPONE - Updates from the crash site of the spaceship-2 tourist spacecraft
- Second space accident in a week, one dead and one injured in the crashes of Virgin's Spaceship-2 spacecraft planned to fly space tourists
Udi Lam also participated in the preparation of the article.
7 תגובות
Joseph
Why slander? Hughes' plane flew...once...low...but flew.
Looks like Howard Hughes' seaplane that never took off.
Doesn't look like a spaceship. Looks like 3 hybrid planes.
The truth is that it would have been very surprising if, following the accident, they had decided to stop the project and shelve it, if after every accident or failure we had stopped research and technological development, we would have still traveled in horse-drawn carriages and arrived from continent to continent only on ships.
No 1 It's really not a matter of luck, it's exactly the role of these test flights to discover and filter failures that may arise during commercial flights, and to fix them in time.
Luckily it happened now and not when the commercial flights started.
The money that Cutter invested is gone.