http://www.space.com/news/080728-whitek ... llout.html
MOJAVE, Calif. — With all the pageantry of a king's arrival, the WhiteKnightTwo — a huge flying launch pad to support passenger suborbital space travel — made its public debut here Monday.
The rollout of the colossal composite plane signals the first phase of a critical test program to establish a private spaceliner business — a venture being bankrolled by British entrepreneur and billionaire, Richard Branson and his Virgin Group.
Looking like a giant catamaran for the sky, the twin-boom, two individual fuselages are topped by a large, 140-foot (42-meter) long stretch of wing. The aircraft will straddle and carry to drop altitude (around 48,000 feet) the SpaceShipTwo — a six passenger, two pilot craft that, once released, will rocket pay-per-view passengers to some 65 miles (104 km) above the Earth.
"This is a big airplane," said Scaled Composites founder, Burt Rutan, and Chief Technology Officer and Chairman Emeritus of the company. "It is not an inappropriate claim to say this is the largest all-composite airplane," he told SPACE.com.
With a giant screen featuring Virgin Galactic's logo of an eye lifting upwards, the audience was treated to the dramatic unveiling of WhiteKnightTwo positioned on the outside tarmac — complete with Branson and Rutan waving from separate windows on the carrier craft. SpaceShipTwo, still under construction, was shrouded in a large black tarp just a few feet away during the unveiling of WhiteKnightTwo. The carrier aircraft has been christened "EVE" in honor of Sir Richard's mother.
Four turbofan jet engines power the WhiteKnightTwo, an aircraft that has more capability than needed for SpaceShipTwo operations, Rutan explained. The mega-plane has undergone extensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) testing, he said — that's aerodynamic speak for utilizing electronic wind tunnel evaluations versus wind tunnel testing.
WhiteKnightTwo is the 40th aircraft of varying types to be rolled out by Scaled Composites, Rutan said. "I think that's more than you'll find in any other company by a large margin."
"The beauty of WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo is that they can help change our relationship with space," Branson said after the rollout. "The other thing that I admire about the system is that it has the architecture that would someday be developed into passenger carrying vehicle able to take people from A to B around the planet, outside of the atmosphere at near orbital speeds."
Branson said he thought it was very important that Virgin Galactic make a genuine commercial success of this project. "If we do I believe we'll unlock a wall of private sector money into both space launch systems and space technology," he said.
Burt Rutan is a GOD. Doing what others can only theorize or postulate what may be able to happen if only humans TRIED....
May this be the first of many creations by Scaled Composites to take us feeble humans into the next frontier. =)
Who needs a government issued budget??? Let the private industry step forth and lead us into the unknown. Just as our ancestors did... just as the next generations should do... just as our future generations will hopefully continue to do without inhibitions by government agencies or others trying to hold our species back.