"My vision for Virgin Galactic is to make affordable manned access to space a reality." "I believe over the next few decades, we will take hundreds of thousands of people to space," Branson tells PM via email. More than 600 customers, including Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher, and Leonardo DiCaprio, have signed up for the trip. The $250,000 ticket will grant riders only about 4 minutes of weightlessness. At an altitude of 68 miles, the curvature of the Earth and the serene glow of the atmosphere will be visible against the blackness of the cosmos. Then the rocket ship will detach, fire its engine, and zoom spaceward. First the 60-foot-long, 140-foot-wingspan craft's mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, will haul SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of 50,000 feet. The new version will carry up to six tourists and two pilots on a two-part journey to space. The hardware, built by famed designer Burt Rutan in collaboration with Virgin Group mogul Richard Branson, laid the groundwork for a business to take customers along for the ride. In 2004 a single-seat craft called SpaceShipOne launched from an airplane, breached the Kármán Line, repeated the feat within two weeks, and won the $10 million prize. The modern equivalent, the Ansari X Prize, helped create what will likely become the first operating space tourism venture, Virgin Galactic. In 1927 Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize. The golden age of aviation between World Wars I and II, radical airplane design was inspired by high-dollar challenges. The company flies experimental vehicles, such as this flight-test capsule, at its private West Texas spaceport. Internet entrepreneur Jeff Bezos kept the existence of his spaceflight company a secret for three years after he founded it in 2000. The capsule returns to Earth under a parachute. The propulsion module's main engine powers a vertical landing near the launch site. The pressurized crew capsule detaches and heads into space. The propulsion module propels the entire spacecraft off the launchpad. A booster with the ability to land under its own rocket power after separating from a capsule would trim the high cost of retrieving it from the ocean after a splashdown. In 2011 the company released footage of a lozenge-shaped preliminary test vehicle, New Shepard, taking off vertically, hovering at an altitude of 548 feet, and then setting gently down. Bezos poured millions of his $25 billion fortune into a venture called Blue Origin, operating out of an experimental launch site he created (with FAA approval) in a remote corner of West Texas. Visionary billionaire Jeff Bezos, the 49-year-old founder of, has spent more than a decade on a secret project to conquer space. The wing area is sized for landing at moderate speeds, near 110 knots-a little slower than that of an airliner during a landing.įly Again: Lynx's creators say the space plane will be able to make four flights a day. Landing: The space plane sheds speed by circling in a downward corkscrew. Reentry: Thermal insulation on the nose and leading edges of the wings protect the craft from the heat of reentry. The craft follows a parabolic trajectory in suborbital space. Takeoff: The space plane speeds along a runway under the power of four rocket engines.Īscent: The Lynx reaches Mach 2.9 as it speeds straight upward.Īpogee: The engines cut out about 3 minutes after takeoff. The first test flight may take place within months. Instead, the Lynx will fire its four custom-made kerosene and liquid-oxygen rocket engines to take off horizontally from a runway, as a plane does, and then climb steeply on its way to space. "It's going to be a real astronaut experience." Unlike capsules and other space planes, the Lynx does not need to ride another rocket to get into space. "You're sitting in the cockpit," says XCOR chief operating officer Andrew Nelson, turning the spacecraft's small size and two-passenger maximum into selling points. It is already selling $95,000 tickets on a 30-foot space plane called the Lynx. XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., believes it can offer the cheapest trip.
Because a so-called suborbital space flight to this altitude requires much less energy than an orbital launch-about one twenty-fifth as much-many private space companies are devising ways to get science experiments and wealthy tourists there. There the atmosphere is so thin that, for most scientific purposes, it's a vacuum. Space is defined by a somewhat arbitrary number-climb above an altitude of 62 miles, the so-called Kármán Line, and an aircraft becomes a spacecraft.
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