This isn't really big news--Burt has always said that he wants to get to orbit, but it looks like Virgin Galactic has made an announcement recently. What will be really interesting is when they reveal the design (if they have one), because the current "badminton birdie" approach isn't going to work for orbital entry velocities.

Nice summary. I wonder how many flight crews they intend to have, two, three? I wonder how long the time between SpaceShipTwo's flights is. If it's like SpaceShipOne, each can fly twice a week for daily service for the fleet. One SpaceShipTwo and one WhiteKnightTwo can always be undergoing more elaborate long-term maintenance. We'll have to look at the environmental impact report for the New Mexico spaceport to see what Virgin Galactic is telling FAA-AST.

If they go to two flights a day, they will need to get their turnaround time to two days. A fleet of five could do 14 flights with one SS2 in long term maintenance. Both WK2s could fly each day or one WK2 could fly twice in a day if the other was in maintenance. Mate up time and checking of the mate up would limit how early in the morning the second flight could go if one of the WK2s was out.

If they have enough maintenance crew and simple enough maintenance to get down to a turnaround of one day, they can do four or five flights a day assuming the WK2s are up to it. At that rate, they would be flying about 1500 flights/year. At five passengers per flight, that's $1.5 billion/year if the $200,000 seat price holds up.

We'll see what happens after they take delivery of the first couple and if they can fill them. Even at half the SS1 turnaround rate with two SS2 each flying once a week, you get 100 flights/year for 500 passengers or $100 million/year which would pay for the development and manufacturing and provide a nice tidy profit for Virgin Galactic.

Have illustrations of SS2 and WK2 appeared anywhere on the web?

I noticed that illustrations _were_ shown on the 60 Minutes' piece. SS2 appeared to be the same exact shape as SS1, but bigger, with several people shown in the cabin.

As for the linked article, it didn't really provide anything newsworthy. Rutan's ultimate plans for an orbital vehicle have been known, and I believe that Virgin Galactic has said that it would be involved if it actually happened. Rutan has also indicated that an orbital vehicle would be at least ten years away, and that he currently lacks the resources to develop it.

"it looks like Virgin Galactic has made an announcement recently"

The Flight International article linked to above is four and a half months old (August 23, 2005). Recent, perhaps, in a geologic sense, although off the top of my head I can't think of anything more recent with more details about SS3/Tier 2.

Of course the important question is not whether they can reach orbit, but at what cost. You're not going to get mass-market demand if the price is some low millions per seat (i.e. a bit better than Soyuz). I've heard people say that about 500K may be a break point.

In any case you have to get durable TPS and some other tech well proven before you can get orbital flight in the price range of SS2, with capability to get even lower with demand- as with SS2.

Unless Burt comes up with some miracle, which I doubt, you probably have to spend about 100-150million on research and flight testing of the required capabilities. Will Branson want to put that much into R&D alone, before building the commercial vehicle? He certainly could 'afford' it but when or whether the SS2 market will suffice to persuade him to go that extra mile to get mass-market priced orbital tickets is the question.

What might SS3 attempt that is not in the t/Space proposal?

SpaceDev's HL-20 variant might be one possibility.

Flight International has some interesting articles, in this more recent article they say White Knight 2 has been enlarged from 737 size to 757 size:
Virgin space base plan allows for bigger ships in future

The Flight International article linked to above is four and a half months old

D'oh!!!

That's what comes from blogging and proposaling at the same time.

Well, at least it kicked off a little discussion...

From Problem's article, it looks like the NM spaceport will be able to handle all current aircraft, including the A380, even though the WK2 will be modestly sized, as these things go.

However, I note that there are several bigger runways in the United States. Interesting context. The WK3 will be a behemoth, but will still be able to operate out of a couple handfuls of airports worldwide, without modification.

My memory may be off, but I seem to remember him saying, during the 60 minutes piece over the summer, that it does include some method of feathering.

Of course, that does the raise the question - how does he plan to deal with TPS

IIRC back in the summer he was saying in interviews there were 2 serious problems left for him. He thought he'd cracked one, but was still not sure about the other.

There are some novel ways around the TPS problem but they usually break something else.

If anybody is going to come up with something, it is probably Rutan though.

It occurs to me that both WK2 and WK3 will strike quite impressive figures on their own and may be valuable marketing tools for Virgin Airways and Scaled Composites otherwise. Even though there might be ITAR issues on displaying SS2 and SS3 in other countries, there wouldn't be the same problems doing so with WK2 and WK3.

Out of curiosity; are there any conventional regulations which will have to be applied to the WK2 as it goes into operation, or does it get covered as part of the launch system?

...are there any conventional regulations which will have to be applied to the WK2 as it goes into operation, or does it get covered as part of the launch system?

Pegasus should have established the precedent for this, with the L-1011 carrier aircraft. I don't think that anything in the new suborbital regulations would change it. I think that the carrier aircraft is handled by AVR, but that raises an interesting issue, since the WK3 won't be certified, except as experimental. That might be all right, though for a launcher.

Does anyone know for sure how Orbital deals with this?

But the L-1011 was already a fully certified aircraft and airframe wasn't it?

That would affect the model wouldn't it?

But the L-1011 was already a fully certified aircraft and airframe wasn't it?

Right. That's why it's a good question. But however they handled it for WK1/SS1 the same model might still apply (except that was done under the old legislation). The matter remains "up in the air," so to speak.

The WK1/SS1 handled this by being an experimental aircraft though... didn't it? So the same model may not apply to a commercial operation.

Hmm... it is an interesting point, it'll be interesting to see how it gets handled especially if air launch is going to be a standard part of most solutions.

> “If the SpaceShipTwo service is successful we will develop SpaceShipThree,
> which is orbital,” says Whitehorn.

Nothing really new. Whitehorn said something similar at ISDC last May. Also at ISDC, Burt Rutan also said he's not ready to do orbital yet. The two statements don't really contradict one another. Virgin is saying they want to do orbital someday, but this is far from a product announcement.

> Does anyone know for sure how Orbital deals with this?

Supplementary Type Certificate, I believe.

I have a minor gripe with the use of acronyms without explanation or context. "TPS" or "thermal protection system" gets mentioned three times by three different authors, but is never explained. Fortunately, Google picked it up otherwise I'd probably have given up trying to figure it out. If you use an acronym or abreviation and it's not standard for the audience (eg, MSM, FWIW, IMHO, "eg" would be standard for this audience), then it makes sense to introduce the term and then the acronym that you'll use in the rest of the post (eg, "thermal protection system (TPS)").

If you're replying to someone who has properly introduced such an acronym, then IMHO you're safe in reusing it without clarification (unless there are unusual circumstances like being in the middle of a vast 1,000 post thread). Otherwise, you too are duty bound to explain the acronym.

I have to second what Karl said. I had to go through several coding references (programmers seem to want to corner the market on TLA's -- does this need explanation?) before I narrowed TPS down to it's correct expansion. ...and could have saved myself the trouble if I didn't have this darn habit of looking up things I don't understand as soon as I come across them. That's probably why the first use of the term is where it's suppose to be explained, eh? ...now back to our program.

I have to confess to more than a little surprise that long-time readers of this web site don't know what the TLA TPS stands for, particularly after the Columbia disaster.

You have to be careful when using acronyms. They're not always understood and are often overloaded (meaning more than one thing). When I arrived in Colorado Springs as a newly minted 2Lt 20 years ago to being my space training, the first document they gave me to read was "SOC SOC" (Satellite Operations Center Systems Operational Concept). The second document was "CSOC SOC." To put a finer point on it, I was working in a facility named with a nested acronym: TMF (Training MCC [Mission Control Complex] Facility). Thus began my space career.

At one point, we tried to develop an acroynm list. After several thousand entries, the project was abandoned as unmanageable. In the DCSC-III satellite program, we had over 1000 telemetry acronyms alone, not counting untold numbers of other acronyms for other parts of the program. That satellite was just one of 4 in my MCC. Add several more in the other MCCs and it was hopeless to develop and manage an acronym list.

In the defense business, "TLA" is sometimes jokingly used to refer to businesses and agencies with "3 Letter Acronyms."

Daniel S: "The WK3 will be a behemoth, but will still be able to operate out of a couple handfuls of airports worldwide, without modification."

Do you have a source at Scaled Composites or Virgin indicating that an orbital SS3 would use a White-Knight-style mother ship -- or even that their planning is far enough along to have made such a decision either way?

Charles L: "You're not going to get mass-market demand if the price is some low millions per seat (i.e. a bit better than Soyuz). I've heard people say that about 500K may be a break point."

The idea of a break point for space access costs -- the knee in the curve where price/demand elasticity would kick in -- goes back at least 40 years. No doubt that Holy Grail is out there somewhere, but there are pathetically few data points, unless one accepts as data (1) market research that is 100% prospective, or (2) shaky historical analogies. While wishing Virgin all luck and success, I believe that for now we're still in "build it and they will come" mode.

Might T-Space use the enhanced capacity of WK3 for its planned manned to LEO proposal?