Tag: Virgin Galactic

Categories
GeekWire

Blue Origin set to pick up the pace for space

Image: Blue Origin launch
Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship rises from its launch pad in June. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, plans to accelerate its current once-every-eight-weeks schedule for flight tests of its New Shepard suborbital spaceship, leading up to the first crewed flights next year, one of the company’s executives said today.

The variety of scientific experiments being flown on the flights will also widen, according to Erika Wagner, Blue Origin’s business development manager. Wagner provided a glimpse of the road ahead for the New Shepard program at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference, which is under way this week in San Diego.

The New Shepard spacecraft was built at Blue Origin’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., but it’s undergoing testing at the company’s West Texas launch site. The reusable, hydrogen-fueled craft already has made four successful uncrewed flights to the edge of outer space and back, including two missions that carried research payloads.

Wagner told the San Diego audience that Blue Origin’s payload manifest has been planned out for the next year, and would add biology experiments to the mix. The team is also looking at ways to modify the spacecraft so that experiments can be exposed to the space environment, rather than staying inside the pressurized New Shepard capsule throughout the flight, she said.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Rocket reports from Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin

Image: VSS Unity
Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo rocket plane is brought out from its hangar in Mojave, Calif. A portion of the plane’s WhiteKnightTwo mothership can be seen at right. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

In the past few weeks, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space venture and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture have both had a lot to talk about. Today, both companies delved more deeply into the nitty-gritty of getting rockets ready for flight.

Three weeks after Virgin Galactic unveiled its second SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, known as VSS Unity, the company said it was putting the craft through integrated vehicle ground testing at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. These tests involves operating the plane’s systems under ground conditions that mimic space conditions as much as possible.

“For example, instead of just testing our feather lock actuators at room temperature, we use liquid nitrogen to chill them down to the temperatures they will experience when performing at high altitude,” Virgin Galactic said in today’s update.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

New SpaceShipTwo generates positive vibes

Image: Hangar rollout
In this photo from the rollout, the VSS Unity rocket plane is on the left, the VMS Eve mothership is on the right, and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson is on the dais. (Virgin Galactic photo)

MOJAVE, Calif. – This time around, Virgin Galactic took no chances with the weather.

When the first SpaceShipTwo rocket plane was rolled out and christened Virgin Spaceship Enterprise in 2009, the craft sat out in Mojave’s December chill. A windstorm ended up spoiling the party and blowing away the tents that Virgin Galactic set up for the celebration.

For Feb. 19’s christening of Virgin Spaceship Unity, the ceremonies were held indoors at the hangar used by Virgin Galactic and its manufacturing arm, known as The Spaceship Company.

Not that the weather was anything to worry about: The show wrapped up in the middle of the afternoon, well before the temperatures dropped and the winds picked up. VSS Unity was even taken outside into the sunshine after the ceremonies wrapped up.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Virgin Galactic christens reborn SpaceShipTwo

Image: VSS Unity
Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, dubbed the VSS Unity, rolls out under the spotlights at the company’s hangar in Mojave, Calif. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

MOJAVE, Calif. – Sixteen months after Virgin Galactic’s first SpaceShipTwo rocket plane was lost amid tragedy, the second SpaceShipTwo was christened Virgin Spaceship Unity with a smashed bottle of milk and a big gulp of celebrity glitz.

Hundreds of employees, VIPs and would-be spacefliers gathered on Feb. 19 for the craft’s official rollout at the Final Assembly, Integration and Test Hangar, or FAITH, here at the Mojave Air and Space Port. And although British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking couldn’t attend the ceremony in person, he read out the rocket plane’s new name in an audio clip.

“We are entering a new space age, and I hope this will help to create a new unity,” said Hawking, who has been guaranteed a free spaceflight if he’s up to it when VSS Unity enters service. “Space exploration has already been a great unifier. We seem able to cooperate between nations in space, in a way we can only envy on Earth.”

Then Virgin Galactic’s founder, British billionaire Richard Branson, arranged for the official christening to be done by his granddaughter, Eva Deia, who was born exactly one year ago today.

“I’m pretty sure a 1-year-old has never christened a spaceship before, so we really are in virgin territory,” Branson quipped. “Today seems to the right time to change that, as we after all are celebrating the birth of two gorgeous ladies.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Space billionaires trade banter and blastoffs

Image: Richard Branson
Richard Branson is in a friendly rivalry with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture may have done another flight test, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is making waves with its rocket progress – but don’t forget about Richard Branson.

“Our spaceship comes back and lands on wheels. Theirs don’t,” the billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic said during a CNBC interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “There’ll be banter like this which will take place, and that’s good. People will have a choice of which spaceships they want to use to go to space.”

Blue Origin is developing spaceships for suborbital as well as orbital trips. In November, Blue Origin’s uncrewed New Shepard test vehicle went into space for the first time and made a successful vertical landing. If all goes well, the company could be flying passengers in two years.

Today there was a torrent of tweets about a possible Blue Origin flight test. First, the Federal Aviation Administration alerted aviators to stay away from the airspace over the company’s test range in West Texas. Then, around midday today, the restrictions were lifted. One Twitter user, Patrick Brown, went so far as to post a picture of what appears to be a rocket trail leading up from the company’s test range in West Texas.

Blue Origin kept mum. “Unfortunately, Blue Origin doesn’t have anything to contribute at this time,” the company said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

SpaceShipTwo No. 2 is due for its debut Feb. 19

Image: Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking addresses Virgin Galactic customers (Credit: Richard Branson via YouTube)

More than a year after the first SpaceShipTwo rocket plane was destroyed in a fatal test flight, Virgin Galactic says the second SpaceShipTwo is ready for its California rollout on Feb. 19 – and famed British physicist Stephen Hawking is invited.

Scores of other VIPs, officials and journalists are invited as well: The date for the rollout was disseminated in advisories that went out this afternoon.

Next month’s event, like the debut of the first SpaceShipTwo in 2009, will unfold at Mojave Air and Space Port in California. It should mark a significant step in Virgin Galactic’s harder-than-expected effort to carry tourists as well as researchers and their payloads on suborbital trips to the edge of outer space.

Virgin Galactic’s billionaire founder, Richard Branson, says he has asked Hawking to be on hand if the 73-year-old British physicist is well enough to travel. That’s not a sure thing: Hawking is coping with a neurogenerative disease that has left him almost completely paralyzed, and he occasionally suffers from pneumonia.

In an interview with The Independent, a British newspaper, Branson said Hawking would “name the new spaceship.”

Get the full story from GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Billionaire space club pits Musk vs. Bezos et al.

Image: Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin's New Shepard craft
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (in hat and sunglasses) pops open a bottle of champagne after Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket landing in November. (Credit: Blue Origin)

When Jeff Bezos welcomed SpaceX to the rocket landing “club” last week, it set off a round of twittering over whether Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and fellow billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX were really in the same league. What kind of club was Bezos talking about?

The club that Bezos had in mind was precisely defined: It consists of ventures that can launch a rocket booster from the ground into space, and then bring that booster back intact for a vertical landing.

Blue Origin was the first to become a member, during a November test flight of its suborbital New Shepard spaceship in Texas. SpaceX followed in December, with the successful landing of its Falcon 9’s first-stage booster after the launch of 11 Orbcomm telecommunication satellites.

Lots of folks have pointed out how much more difficult it is to bring back a booster after an orbital launch, as opposed to New Shepard’s up-and-down suborbital trip. The Falcon 9 stage is more than 10 times as powerful and rose twice as high as New Shepard. The implications are greater, as well: Musk says total rocket reusability could lower the cost of delivering satellites and other payloads to orbit by a factor of 100, and eventually open the way for building a city on Mars.

Based on Bezos’ narrow definition of the club, Blue Origin may have been the first member, but this month SpaceX took the lead.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Virgin Galactic will use jet as rocket mothership

Image: Virgin Galactic jet
An artist’s conception shows a 747 jet carrying a LauncherOne rocket. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

Virgin Galactic showed off its latest mothership today: a Boeing 747-400 jet that it acquired from its corporate cousins at Virgin Atlantic to serve as the platform for its LauncherOne rocket.

LauncherOne is designed to be launched from a high-flying carrier airplane and send small-scale satellites into orbit. It will use a liquid-fueled engine called Newton, which is still under development. The launch system is expected to be in operation by 2018, and it’s already been tapped by OneWeb to help put a global Internet constellation into orbit.

It was previously thought that LauncherOne would use Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane. That’s the mothership being used for SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered passenger space plane. But Virgin Galactic said the 747 was more suited for LauncherOne’s upgraded payload capacity and flight rate.

Get the full story on GeekWire.