I do hope Branson’s venture becomes a Harvard Business School case study in entreprenuership.
Virgin Group head Sir Richard Branson unveiled the latest addition to his air- and spaceline fleet at the Mojave Airport in California today, accompanied by the craft’s chief designer, Burt Rutan.
The White Knight 2 is a four-engine jet that will carry an 8-seat spaceship called SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of 48,000 feet so that the spaceship can drop off and fire its rocket engine for a brief run to suborbital space. Branson’s Virgin Galactic hopes to begin regularly scheduled passenger service to space in 2010.
White Knight 2, Branson, and Rutan: Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson (left) and air- and spacecraft designer Burt Rutan wave from the cockpit of the White Knight 2. Photo by Michael Belfiore
Rutan’s company Scaled Composites made history in 2004 with the world’s first privately funded manned spaceflights by its three-seat SpaceShipOne, which was carried aloft by the original White Knight. The White Knight 2 features two fuselages, each with its own cabin, connected by a single continuous wing arching between them, where the spaceship will ride. With the wing span of a B-29 bomber, it is the largest all-carbon-fiber aircraft yet built.
On hand to christen the White Knight Two outside a Scaled hangar was Branson’s mother, Eve. Not coincidentally, Eve is also the name of the mother ship. “If you’re going to name a mother ship,” Branson quipped to a gathering of perhaps two hundred reporters and dignitaries, including Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, “you might as well name it after your own mother.”
SETI hasn’t yet found any coherent signals. Could the aliens be beaming neutrinos instead of electromagnetic waves?
John Learned of the University of Hawaii and colleagues have worked out that advanced alien civilizations could send messages within the Milky Way using neutrinos, and that these messages could be picked up using neutrino detectors currently under construction here on Earth.
More at Physics World.
A very interesting review of current commercial space projects by Jeff Foust, whose Space Review is an excellent resource for those following the race for “the final frontier”.
I missed this Oct, 2007 Pomerantz interview…
The big event at X Prize Cup 2007 is the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, in which DIY engineers try and fly their homemade rockets from one concrete pad to another, 100 meters away. NASA put up the $2 million in prize money, hoping they’ll get a sense of how a new generation of mooncraft might look. Instead of paying hundreds of millions to a giant corporation for paper plans, NASA, along with Northrop Grumman, is checking out the crowd-sourcing approach to space exploration. I spoke to William Pomerantz, the director of Space Projects for The X Prize Foundation and the man overseeing the competition.
Wired News: Give me a walk-through of the challenge.
William Pomerantz: It’s an annual competition for teams that can build a rocket that has the power required to go from lunar orbit to lunar surface and back. As you know, NASA said they’ll be going back to the moon, for human missions, and other governments have said they’ll do the same.
The Apollo LM (lunar module), which was built by the Grumman corporation and that did the job every time and did it perfectly, has been retired. They are all in museums. No one has tried to do that job again in the last 35 years. Right now there is not a spacecraft that can do the job.
[more]
Google is offering $30 million in prizes for the first two teams to land a robotic rover on the moon and send images and other data back home.
For those who’ve not been following the Google Lunar X Prize, the NY Times has a bit of an update.
At Google’s headquarters here on Thursday, 10 teams from five countries announced their intention to participate in the competition. They include a team led by William L. Whitaker, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and renowned roboticist; an affiliation of four universities and two major aerospace companies in Italy; and one group that is a loose association of engineers coordinating their efforts online.
…Addressing the X Prize teams and journalists, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, compared his company’s support of the competition with other companies’ sponsorship of yacht races. “The idea we can help spur the return to the moon and maybe even do it more quickly than some of the national plans is really exciting to me,” Mr. Brin said.
Google will pay $20 million to the first team that lands on the moon, sends a package of data back to Earth, then travels at least 500 meters and sends another data package. The second team to accomplish the goals will win $5 million. Bonuses are offered for feats like visiting a historic landing site and finding and detecting lunar ice, but the prize money starts to shrink if the mission is not accomplished by 2012.
Dr. Whitaker of Carnegie Mellon is leading a team that includes the University of Arizona and Raytheon, the military contractor. He said he planned to use kerosene and oxygen to fuel his rocket, and once it is on the moon, to send a rover to the site of the first moon landing in the Sea of Tranquillity. “Our extravaganza will be at Apollo 11,” he said.
One interesting comment at the event came from Harold Rosen — who clearly does not think the prospects for orbital solar power stations are good:
There was some discord at the event. A video produced by the X Prize Foundation, promoting reasons to revisit the moon, described the mining of silicon, which is abundant in the lunar soil. The video claimed that the material could be used in space to construct solar-powered satellites that would transmit cheap and abundant energy to Earth.
In a question-and-answer session, Dr. Harold A. Rosen, an inventor of the geostationary satellite who is heading his own X Prize team, called that claim “one of the most outrageous ideas I’ve ever heard.” He added: “I can think of about a hundred thousand more efficient ways of getting energy on Earth than that.”
William Pomerantz, Director, Space Projects at the X Prize Foundation did a short video covering the ten-team announcement. BTW, Pomerantz is the moderator of the Google Lunar X PRIZE Community Forums.
There was no mention of Team Cringely, Bob Cringely’s effort to compete for the prize on a fraction of, e.g., the Carnegie Mellon budget. I don’t know what to make of Bob’s project — when he first announced I thought it was wacky.
An efficient source for tracking developments of the Google Lunar X Prize and all the many other space prizes, try the Space Prizes Blog. And the SF Chronicle has a short first person report.
Santa Cruz software consultant Fred Bourgeois III represented the hacker-hippie element of the tech community with his Team FredNet. It will rely on the concept of “open source” engineering - that is, throwing ideas out to a community of interested participants who will be encouraged to trouble-shoot and improve designs offered by the core team.
“We intend to create a rover slightly larger than the typical cell phone,” Bourgeois said, adding that the team hopes eventually to deploy a network of these mini-rovers on asteroids to gather signals from deep space.
An update on the Virgin Galactic project.
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