24 February 2005
Have Spaceplane Will Travel
Competition Comes to Budding Space Travel Industry!
This is all just too cool!
After Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne won the Ansari-X Prize for repeated suborbital spaceflight, a deal with Sir Richard Branson (Virgin Group companies) was announced to build similar craft for a new operation christened Virgin Galactic, which would offer regular availability of passenger spaceflight.
Now comes Rocketplane Ltd. of Oklahoma, who is building a suborbital space plane based on a Learjet fuselage, with different wings, added rocket drive, etc. to do the same type of thing. It is particularly neat to be utilizing pre-existing off-the-shelf technology this way.
Let the new space race begin (and continue)!
This is all just too cool!
After Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne won the Ansari-X Prize for repeated suborbital spaceflight, a deal with Sir Richard Branson (Virgin Group companies) was announced to build similar craft for a new operation christened Virgin Galactic, which would offer regular availability of passenger spaceflight.
Now comes Rocketplane Ltd. of Oklahoma, who is building a suborbital space plane based on a Learjet fuselage, with different wings, added rocket drive, etc. to do the same type of thing. It is particularly neat to be utilizing pre-existing off-the-shelf technology this way.
Let the new space race begin (and continue)!
