On the plane carrying the Spaceship 2 spacecraft, the White Knight 2, three experiments will be installed to test the air vehicle at an altitude of 15 km * The company rejected a request from a producer of pornographic films to shoot a film in the spacecraft
The company wants to enter the field of space tourism, when it will allow ordinary people to take off on a regular basis to sub-orbital and also wants to help science. Virgin Galactic wants to install experimental devices on the planes that bring the passengers up.
Virgin Galactic's owner, Richard Branson, is now joining the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) to collect information on the composition of the atmosphere, especially greenhouse gases. NOAA is interested in flying atmospheric monitoring instruments on the carrier plane of SpaceShip2, the company's passenger ship. Placing the devices on the White Knight Two plane will allow them to enjoy the high altitude that the plane will reach, 2 thousand feet (about 50 km), during the test flights in the next year and a half. “Almost everything NOAA does right now operates at a maximum altitude of 15.2 feet (25 m). It is difficult to find airplanes that can perform atmospheric experiments above this height" says Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic.
"One of the things we know as an airline is that the tropopause is gradually rising. This thing has an effect on planes flying in the upper atmosphere and the amount of turbulence they encounter. This is probably related to the mixture of greenhouse gases and the height they reach, which raises the tropopause." Whitehorn told reporters at the International Astronautical Association conference, the IAC, in Glasgow.
Spaceship 2 will be carried by White Knight 2 to an altitude of 15.2 km. At this height, the spacecraft will activate its rocket engines and take the passengers to a maximum height of 110 kilometers. The carrier plane will carry three instruments. One will measure the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane gas in the atmosphere. The second will sample the air at different altitudes in a test tube, which will allow testing at NOAA's laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. Then a wide variety of gases. The third experiment will be a tube that empties the gases on the way up and fills with gases on the way back down.
According to Whitehorn, when the regular flights of Spaceship 2 begin, it will be able to provide NOAA with regular gas samples of the ionosphere - the uppermost region of the atmosphere, up to a height of 110 kilometers above the Earth. This will allow the agency to calibrate data coming from its carbon-monitoring satellites, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a joint NOAA-NASA satellite due to launch next year.
In the first stage, there is no exchange of money between the company and the government agency, because the plane is in the experimental stages. Spaceship 2 is 60% complete. The company plans to unveil the complete spacecraft next summer. Virgin Galactic says that 280 customers signed up for a flight to the edge of space.
And in the process, Whitehorn said that a person who preferred not to be named, brought the company an advance of one million dollars (the price of five tickets) to guarantee himself the possibility of shooting a pornographic film in space. In a lecture he gave at a conference in Glasgow, he said that the request was rejected outright.
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That the image is perfectly fine knowledge is something that embraces the world.
Laurie, what's wrong with the picture?
It's a shame they rejected the business proposal of the pornographic producers. I understand the considerations of reputation, but if this is a private space industry, then there is something in business entrepreneurship that can push the project and bring it to the attention of "normal" people and not just to the knowledge of scientists, movie stars, rich people and various oligarchs.
On top of that, sex is one of the oldest professions in human history so why not be one of the first industries in space as well.
Father I must tell you that I love this site, and really enjoy your articles, but you must change the picture
It's a shame they rejected the porn producer's request.
Technology companies are praying that the porn industry will adopt their innovation. And everyone remembers how the porno industry preferred the big video tapes (for several reasons), and the small ones (the best of the lot) disappeared into the abyss of femininity. And the rest is history (and here's an idea for a chapter for Ran Levy).