Virgin Galactic
music: Wheel in the Sky Keeps on Turning.
You know, when Mike pointed me at this venture I totally didn’t believe it. Virgin airlines teaming up with Rutan’s Scaled team to make SpaceShipOne knock offs to put people in space? No way. But there are some real news agencies reporting it now. Wow. Just wow. The future is here now. When I started getting excited about SpaceShipOne a few years back people told me not to get my hopes up. This exceeds my wildest imagination at the time.
Wow. Of course they haven’t exactly made their x-prize flights yet, but hey, who needs that when you can start signing up customers. Still, for this to be cost effective they will need to really be able to fly the thing with week turn arounds repeatedly for years. This would need to be the most reliable spacecraft ever by two or three orders of magnitude! We will see if this really gets off the ground, but so far most of Rutans stuff has actually taken off. So to speak.
Too cool for words.
Update: they expect to launch 3000 people over the course of 5 years for $200k each. House or calling yoursef an astronaut? (600/year = 120 flights / 5 space ships = 24 flights / ship / year. ~ 1 flight every 2 weeks!) Heh, only the rich of the rich will fly in these suicide machines. That is awesome. It’s like the gladiators of old, only the rich get themselves killed instead of the poor. Of course, I’d do it in a NY minute if someone else was going to pay for it, but still, I like it!