Press Release
The American Museum of Natural History, with its impressive space collection, proved to be the ideal venue for Virgin Galactic to present the new design for SpaceShipTwo (SS2) and WhiteKnight Two (WK2) to the World’s press on 23rd January 2008. The Press Conference also allowed the Virgin Galactic panel to provide an update on the business and announce the start of the WK2 testing program.
The Power House was jam packed with 150 members of the Press, around 40 broadcast film crew, over 100 of our customers and numerous partners from Industry who have supported Virgin Galactic over the past three years.
George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s Senior Advisor, introduced the presentation panel (Sir Richard Branson, Chairman Virgin Group; Burt Rutan, CEO Scaled Composites; Will Whitehorn, Virgin Galactic President; Stephen Attenborough, Virgin Galactic Commercial Director) and welcomed the press, customers and our partners from Industry including Foster + Partners, Pratt and Whitney, EAA AirVenture, Mojave Air and Space Port, DMJM Aviation, Virtuoso, X Prize Foundation, Swedish Space Corporation, URS, NASTAR, Spaceport America and Wyle Laboratories.
The audience was reminded of the background of the project and the challenges Virgin Galactic had set Burt, ‘to design and to build a safe commercial launch system for us which would allow thousands of people to fulfill their dream of seeing the beauty of space, the blue planet below them and experiencing the weightlessness of zero gravity’.
After a brief history on manned space vehicles and the use of composite materials, Will explained our objectives and updated the audience on what we had been up to over the past three years.
‘We wanted to give WK2 the capability of carrying not just the spaceship with eight people on suborbital flights, but also have the open architecture which could allow people to develop vehicles capable of other things: unmanned vehicles which could truly revolutionise the industrial applications of space at a time when civilization needs all the technological help it can get’.
Will closed his presentation with some unique footage from the factory floor at Scaled and pointed out how WK2 is over seventy percent complete and how Burt Rutan and his team are preparing to commence test flights later this year and how it will be the largest all composite aircraft ever built .
‘Scaled’s SS2 flight simulator (which also doubles up as a flight simulator for the WK2) is now fully operational, and Virgin’s cadre of pilots are being trained on it.
The SS2 is now nearly sixty percent complete – Burt Rutan is shown here sitting in the extremely spacious SS2 cabin, surrounded by the large windows for that all important view’.
Richard Branson then took the microphone and welcomed everyone to the historic occasion and described how 2008 really would be the ‘Year of the Spaceship’.
‘If our new system could carry only people into space that would be enough for me, because of the transforming effect it will have on the thousands who will travel with us. It is quite clear from every astronaut that I have spoken to – including SpaceShipOne test pilots Brian Binnie and Mike Melville – that seeing the planet from out there, surrounded by the incredibly thin protective layer of atmosphere, helps one to wake up to the fragility of the small portion of the planet’s mass that we inhabit, and to the importance of protecting the Earth’.
‘It was Stephen Hawking who first got me thinking about this issue, when he explained clearly and concisely to the BBC that mankind had no option but to get to space as quickly as possible and start doing things up there that we have been doing on planet Earth, but in a much more efficient manner. Our population is now heading to 9 billion people by the middle of this century — that’s three times more than when I was born. With the end of the oil era approaching, and climate change progressing faster than most models have been predicting, the utilisation of space is essential not only for communications but also for the logistics of survival through things such as weather satellites, agricultural monitoring, GPS and climate science’.
He pointed out that, while the first priority for Virgin Galactic is developing the market for human spaceflight, the company is already assessing the potential for unmanned launch capabilities.
‘The fact that this system will have the capability to launch small payloads and satellites at low cost is hugely important. As far as science is concerned, this system offers tremendous potential to researchers who will be able to run experiments much more often than before, and help to answer key questions about Earth’s climate and the mysteries of the universe. Consider research – it is currently just too expensive to be able to do most of the things in space from which industries like biotechnology could really benefit. The beauty of WK2 and SS2 is that they can help change the paradigm of our relationship with space, achieving an era where space accessibility becomes a commercial and scientific norm, rather than an exception’.
Richard congratulated Burt ‘on designing and building a system that will allow thousands of people to realize their dreams and that will act as a catalyst to transform human access to space’. Richard and Burt then revealed the design of SS2 and WK2 by pulling back some ‘hanger doors’ unveiling two beautiful models of SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnight Two’.
After a enthusiastic applause and a lengthy round of flash photography, the audience settled and allowed Burt to take the microphone. Making full use of the stunning models (including a fully motorized feathering model of SS2), Burt gave an update on the technical design and invited his team from Scaled onto the stage.
Matthew Stinemetze, Bob Morgan, Peter Siebold, James Tighe and Luke Colby talked through the design, development and build of SS2 and WK2, bringing a new depth and breadth to the factory footage and models.
Stephen Attenborough, Virgin Galactic’s Commercial Director, warmly thanked over a hundred of Virgin Galactic’s customers who had travelled from around the globe to attend the Press Conference and explained how they ‘provided Virgin with an early assurance that our business had a ready market, which would justify our faith and investment in developing the vehicles and establishing the world’s first commercial space line’. He described the overwhelming response to the business and how at present more than 85,000 people have registered an interest in becoming Virgin Galactic Astronauts and that Virgin Galactic have secured many millions in deposits.
The audience heard how around 80 of Virgin Galactic’s Founder customers had joined us on a series of G-Force training days at the NASTAR centrifuge facility in Philadelphia and how in those two days, each of them experienced something normally the sole preserve of fast jet pilots and astronauts. He explained how 50 of our specially-appointed Accredited Space Travel Agents had also successfully completed this training and that NASTAR will shortly be opening the experience to the general public. The Centrifuge Training film showed Richard, his son Sam and many of our customers demonstrating the excitement felt when experiencing G forces and allowed the audience to share their exhilaration. Stephen noted that Virgin Galactic achieved a 93% success rate with these activities, which was 10-15% higher than our original business plan projections.
‘Our youngest centrifuge rider was Sam Branson at 22, and our oldest was Professor James Lovelock at 88 – as far as we know, the youngest and the oldest individuals to have sustained high G’s’.
‘Overall, we proved conclusively that ordinary people can go to space and that, actually, almost all of us have the right stuff’.