Branson's Spaceship Opened for Depositing Customers

[Jimbeaux]

I saw this this morning; I would have thought PH would be all over it.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/12/07/branson.s...

[Eric Mc]

Look forward to this when it happens.

[Eric Mc]

Guam said:

Hang on I thought Branson was the green Champion, whats the Carbon footprint of this puupy then?

<ironic mode off>

Good stuff IMHO


Cheers

Hardly any.

The engine only fires for a few minutes. It uses solid propellant fuel which probably emits very little CO2 - although it will chuck out some pretty nasty pollutants of a non-CO2 nature.

The jet engines on the White Knight carier aircarft are pretty standard small biz jet engines so are fairly efficient and clean by jet engine standards. Again, flight time is short as the average White Night flight will never exceed an hour or so as it only needs to climb to the launch height before dropping the Virgin Galactic craft and returning to base.

[Eric Mc]

There are a number of errors in that report.

Although Branson states that no spacecraft has ever had such large windows, that is not really true. The cockpit windows of the space shuttle are much bigger - and have to cope with much higher speeds, altitudes and heating. He may have been refering to "passenger windowws" but, then again, no spacecraft has ever been designed to cary "tourists" in the way Virgin Galactic is so windows for sight seeing were never envisaged in previous spacecraft.

The report states that the craft will not enter an orbital "altitude". In fact, it's not the altitude that prevents Virgin Galactic entering orbit but the fact that it reaches nowhere near the speed required to achieve orbit., 17,500 mph. Virgin Galactic will reach speeds closer to those achieved by the North American X-15 reasearch rocket plane of the late 1950s/1960s and i.e. maximum speed of around 4,000 mph.

[Einion Yrth]

The article said:

He said he hopes the technology will lead to a new form of Earth travel, jetting people across oceans and continents faster through suborbital routes.

Ah, suborbital ballistic 'hops'. Half of the time the toilet is inaccessible and the other half it's out of order.