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WhiteKnightTwo in flight over Las Cruces airport in June 2009. The landing gear is partially extended during this overflight. The AP reported late today that part of the landing gear for Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo aircraft collapsed upon landing at the end of a test flight today at Mojave Air and Space Port in California. An [...] Enrico Palermo of Virgin Galactic discusses the company’s development of SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo at the NewSpace 2010 conference on Saturday. At the end of Saturday’s sessions at the NewSpace 2010 conference in Silicon Valley, Enrico Palermo, project engineering manager for Virgin Galactic, gave a brief update on the company’s activities. There weren’t any new announcements [...] Virgin Galactic has posted a video of yesterday’s first captive carry flight of SpaceShipTwo, including a brief interview at the end with test pilot Mark Stuckey, who says that “I don’t think we could have planned, realistically planned, for any better success” on [...] WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo take off Monday morning from Mojave (credit: Mark Greenberg) Yesterday morning WhiteKnightTwo took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California with a special payload attached to it: SpaceShipTwo, making its first, albeit captive carry, flight. The flight lasted two hours and 54 minutes and achieved an altitude of about 13,700 [...] The web site Big Think has posted an extended interview with Burt Rutan, who talks about space tourism, innovation in NASA and the private sector, and other topics. I haven’t watched the full one-hour interview in its entirety yet, but in the portions I’ve watched he covers some familiar ground about the utility of space [...] Here’s a set of photos from Saturday’s WhiteKnightTwo overflight of Las Cruces that I took at the local [...] As promised, WhiteKnightTwo did make an appearance in the skies over Las Cruces on Saturday morning. The aircraft took off from Phoenix and, at around 9:30 am MDT (11:30 am EDT) made a series of three low passes over the airport. WK2 made a pair of passes over the 8/26 runway and then, after taking about [...] Flightglobal.com reports that WhiteKnightTwo has completed two more test flights in recent days, which appear to clear the way for the aircraft to make its first long-distance flight on Friday to fly over the groundbreaking ceremonies for Spaceport America in New Mexico. A one-hour test flight on June 11th (as noted in the flight logs) [...] WhiteKnightTwo’s test program continued this week with a seventh test flight, Scaled Composites revealed in the test logs for the program. The flight set new records for altitude (45,000 feet/13,700 meters), speed (340 knots/630 km/h) and duration (6.1 hours). Plans still call for the aircraft to make a flyby at the Spaceport America groundbreaking next [...] WhiteKnightTwo (aka “VMS Eve”) has made its sixth test flight, according to a tweet from Virgin Galactic. The flight was a success and reached a peak altitude of 10,670 meters (35,000 feet), according to the statement, which would make it the highest test flight to date. As of midday Thursday the flight hadn’t yet [...] |
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