You can find a NASA astronaut to come up with any opinion you want, but Andy Thomas isn’t impressed with SpaceShipTwo. I share the criticisms (which were made by me and others when the SpaceShipOne concept was first revealed), but I don’t think it’s doomed to failure. It offers a different experience than New Shepard, and will have its own market. I continue to find it ironic that the systems Burt added for “safety” probably added hazards instead.
3 thoughts on “Dissing Virgin Galactic”
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It will never go higher than about 100K. I realized this when I saw that SpaceShipOne pulled 8g’s on the return.
I free falls from the top of its flight path until it hits enough atmosphere to slow down. Without something like the Shuttle tiles or an ablative heat shield, it has to slow down quickly, before it can generate too much heat. This puts a hard upper limit on how much energy can be dissipated that translates directly to maximum altitude. It’s likely that SpaceShipTwo won’t be able to go as high.
The way forward for the design is obvious. All they need to do is ignite the warp engines at the apogee and they’ll have an almost fully functioning deep space vehicle.
I saw that video showing sparks coming out their rocket nozzle, and my one thought was, “They didn’t give up on the hybrid rocket motor, now didn’t they?”