NewSpace Journal » Scaled Composites

Virgin Galactic ramps up SpaceShipTwo testing

Jeff Foust — Wed, 11 May 2011 10:22:36 +0000

SpaceShipTwo during the feathered portion of a glide flight last week. (Clay Center Observatory/Virgin Galactic)

For some time, a long pause in glide tests of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo raised questions about the progress the company was making, in partnership with Scaled Composites, on development of suborbital spacecraft. After a January 13th glide test, the fourth overall for the vehicle, more than three months elapsed without another (although attempts to conduct a glide test in mid-February were aborted due to poor weather conditions, according to Scaled’s flight logs.)

That’s changed, though, in a big way. In less than three weeks, Virgin and Scaled have doubled the number of glide flights of SpaceShipTwo, with four flights between April 22 and May 10. Those flights included glide flights of longer duration on April 22 and 27, followed by the first flight of SpaceShipTwo that tested the vehicle’s ability to “feather” its wings, on May 4. That feathering, like that used on SpaceShipOne, rotates the tail section to a 65-degree angle, and is intended to provide for a stable reentry of the vehicle on suborbital spaceflights. On last week’s test, SpaceShipTwo flew in the feathered configuration for about 75 seconds before rotating the wings back to their normal configuration for landing.

Scaled and Virgin followed up that test with another glide test, this time without feathering, on Tuesday. That test was designed to perform testing on “flutter susceptibility” and also pilot proficiency, according to the flight logs. Why this sudden surge in testing isn’t clear, nor is there any indication from the company when they’ll be ready to start powered flight tests of SpaceShipTwo.

SpaceShipOne details in Allen’s book

Jeff Foust — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 04:07:57 +0000

Paul Allen’s appearance on “Charlie Rose” this week wasn’t out of the blue: it was prompted by the release of his new memoir, Idea Man. The book covers the various interests in his life, and while much of the publicity about the book has centered on the passages about co-founding and working at Microsoft with Bill Gates, there is a whole chapter devoted to his interest in space. The bulk of the chapter, after talking about how the early Space Race captured his imagination about the topic, offers some interesting details about the development of SpaceShipOne, the suborbital vehicle he funded that won the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE in 2004.

Allen first met with Burt Rutan in September 1996 in Mojave, Allen recounts in the book. “Burt had already begun thinking about a supersonic plane that could fly above the atmosphere,” Allen writes. Two years later, in Seattle, this idea took the form of a crewed suborbital rocket. At the time, Allen said he had a relatively narrow goal: “I wanted to do something in rocketry that no one had done before.” He was attracted to Rutan because of his perfect safety record, noting that for space tourism to be viable, it would have to have safety “comparable to the airline industry.”

At that time the project didn’t go forward since Rutan hadn’t come up with the “right design”, Allen writes. When Rutan did—the air-launched system with the feathered wings that provide the vehicle a “carefree” reentry—they reached an agreement in 2000, and by 2002 signed a contract creating Mojave Aerospace Ventures (MAV). They were initially not interested in the X PRIZE because it wasn’t funded, but when it became clear shortly after establishing MAV that it would, they changed the design of the vehicle to increase its crew capacity from one to three in order to meet the prize rules. That, Allen said, increased the system’s cost from a projected $9 million to $19 million. “Based on what I’d heard about bleeding-edge aircraft, I expected SpaceShipOne to come in overweight, underpowered, over budget, and behind schedule,” he writes.

While competing for the Ansari X PRIZE, Allen writes that Rutan in particular didn’t think that they had any competition from other teams, calling The da Vinci Project, the Canadian team that eventually made a last-ditch, but futile, effort to beat out SpaceShipOne, “especially far-fetched.” Curiously, Allen writes that they were concerned about “rumored covert efforts in Eastern Europe”, without offering more details.

Much of the rest of the chapter then discusses the development and test flights of SpaceShipOne. Allen was present for the first powered test flight on December 17, 2003, where test pilot Brian Binnie landed SS1 too hard on the runway, causing it to tumble off the runway but without significant damage. That incident, he said, set back their testing schedule by about two months, as they’d hoped prior to that to make the prize-winning flights in the summer of 2004; they instead took place in late September and early October.

After SpaceShipOne’s initial flight into space in June 2004, where the vehicle just barely made it above the von Kármán line (100 kilometers), Allen recalls there were concerns about whether SS1 could do the X PRIZE flights with a heavier load (it had to carry the mass equivalent of three people, although all the flights had only a single person, the pilot, on board). “In fact, SpaceShipOne hadn’t been pushed as close to its limit in June as it had seemed,” he writes. The vehicle was remarkably sturdy, with aerodynamic safety margins of 2.1 to 3 for various components (compared to 1.6 for a typical airliner), and engineers were able to reduce the vehicle’s weight to improve its performance. They also found they could put more nitrous oxide in the vehicle’s oxidizer tank by reducing the ullage, or empty space, that wasn’t needed since the oxidizer didn’t heat up and expand as much as first thought, in part because they took off in the early morning and quickly climbed to higher, colder altitudes.

Allen writes that a month before the June SpaceShipOne flight, Richard Branson approached him about licensing the SpaceShipOne technology. That led to a contract signed in September 2004 “that could net me $25 million over the next fifteen years.” Branson was at the prize-winning flight on October 4, and, as SpaceShipOne was ascending towards space, said to Allen, “Paul, isn’t this better than the best sex you ever had?” Allen didn’t respond, but according to his book he did think, If I was this anxious during any kind of interpersonal activity, I couldn’t enjoy it very much.

Allen could enjoy it, though, when SS1 safely returned and captured the prize. When he heard the roar of the crowd that had assembled in Mojave for the flight, “it struck me that SpaceShipOne was more than some momentary spectacle. It offered hope to everyone who aspired to journeys beyond the Earth.”

In the end, he writes, SpaceShipOne did come in over budget: he said the program’s total cost was $28 million, in the ballpark of previous estimates of its cost. He added that he achieved a “net positive return” on that investment by 2006, thanks to the prize money (he split the $10-million prize with Rutan), the Virgin licensing fees, and also the tax writeoff from donating SpaceShipOne to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “For a time I was tempted to stay involved in the effort to commercialize space tourism,” he writes, but made a decision to step back several months before SS1 won the prize, letting Virgin Galactic take the lead. As he told Charlie Rose earlier this week, he is now considering getting back in.

While Allen has a financial involvement with space tourism ventures, he’s not interested in flying himself. “But seeing up close what’s involved in spaceflight gave me pause. I’m not an edge walker.” What the SpaceShipOne experience did do, though, was restore his “boyhood sense of wonder” he had when he looked at the night sky. “It was good to get it back.”

BBC gets a behind-the-scenes look at SpaceShipTwo

Jeff Foust — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:35:10 +0000

Screenshot of a video report by the BBC's Richard Scott showing the interior of SpaceShipTwo.

BBC reporter Richard Scott has a bit of an exclusive: a look behind the scenes of the development of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo as well as Spaceport America in New Mexico. The real exclusive is the first look inside SpaceShipTwo, briefly seen in the two-minute video. (Other videos in the article include an interview with test pilot Pete Siebold and a tour of Spaceport America.)

The video makes it clear that SS2 is still very much a work in progress: the interior is barebones, lacking even seats (although the fittings where the rotating passenger seats will be installed can be seen). The video also helps illustrate the relatively modest size of the cabin. While Scott is able to stand up normally in the cabin, it seems likely it will look a bit more cramped when fully outfitted and containing six passengers; he notes in the article that the cabin’s size “will probably mean them bumping into each other” during the weightless portion of the flight. The date of the video isn’t specified, but it shows SpaceShipTwo undergoing a fair amount of interior and exterior work at the time: the vehicle’s nose, for example, was removed.

One interesting note is something made in passing by Scott about SpaceShipTwo: “It’s going to be taking paying passengers into space from hopefully 2013.” That’s later than previous reports, which have suggested that Virgin would put SpaceShipTwo into commercial service next year. SpaceShipTwo, meanwhile, hasn’t made a glide flight since mid-January, according to Scaled Composites’ flight logs, although two attempts for glide flights in mid-February was aborted because of weather conditions.

Third glide flight for SpaceShipTwo

Jeff Foust — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:26:56 +0000

SpaceShipTwo during its first glide test on October 10, 2010. (credit: Mark Greenberg/Virgin Galactic)

Scaled Composites carried out a third glide test flight of SpaceShipTwo (SS2) on Wednesday. According to the company’s WK2/SS2 flight test logs, SS2 flew free for 11 minutes and 39 seconds after its release from WhiteKnightTwo. There were no major milestones reported for the test, and all test objectives were achieved, according to the log. Those objectives included flying to “a more aggressive stall indication” and a slightly higher airspeed and g-forces.

Flybys: commercial space conference, TSC factory groundbreaking, SpaceX rescheduling

Jeff Foust — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 12:09:55 +0000

Special Aerospace Services, a Colorado aerospace company, announced Monday they would host the first Commercial Human Spaceflight Technical Forum in Boulder this coming January. The one-and-a-half-day conference is designed to give attendees “insight to techniques that will be required to successfully achieve NASA human rating certification and FAA commercial spaceflight licensing”, according to the conference web site. Featured speakers include former shuttle program manager Wayne Hale and former astronaut Jeffrey Ashby.

Groundbreaking is scheduled for Tuesday in Mojave for a new production facility for WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. The 68,000-square-foot (6,300-square-meter) factory for The Spaceship Company (a joint venture of Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites) is slated for completion in September 2011. The formal name of the facility, according to a Tehachapi News article, is the Final Assembly, Integration and Test Hangar, which, yes, has the acronym FAITH.

SpaceX has rescheduled its next Falcon 9 launch for no earlier than December 7, citing both delays of other launches at Cape Canaveral as well as a desire to run more tests. The launch will be the first of three planned test flights of the Dragon spacecraft under its COTS agreement with NASA. The delay will also give SpaceX additional time to secure a first-ever reentry license for the Dragon from the FAA.

Some people dream their whole lives about flying in space. For Marc and Sharon Hagle, they sort of stumbled across the opportunity, the Orlando Sentinel reports. The two were taking a Zero-G flight along with, as it turned out, a number of Virgin Galactic sales agents, and as the article notes, “It didn’t take much to sell the Hagles on the chance for some real space travel.”

SpaceShipTwo performs second glide test

Jeff Foust — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:36:47 +0000

The first SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VSS Enterprise, performed a glide test this morning in the skies above the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, according to observers as well as Virgin Galactic. No details about the flight test, other than that it was successful, have been released, although when more details are available they’ll likely be included in the SS2 flight log at Scaled.

Update: the log has been updated, noting that all test objectives were achieved. Highlights include: “Flew to more aggressive stall indication. Evaluated handling and stability through several maneuvers.”

SS2 glide test video

Jeff Foust — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:07:44 +0000

Some video of the test flight released overnight by Virgin Galactic, including interviews with Richard Branson and Burt Rutan:

SpaceShipTwo makes its first glide flight

Jeff Foust — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 21:22:05 +0000

SpaceShipTwo during its first glide test on October 10, 2010. (credit: Mark Greenberg/Virgin Galactic)

In a press release this afternoon, Virgin Galactic declared the glide test this morning by SpaceShipTwo a success. The WhiteKnightTwo aircraft VMS Eve released SpaceShipTwo (VSS Enterprise) at an altitude of 45,000 feet (13,700 meters), and SS2 glided to a landing at Mojave Air and Space Port 11 minutes later, shortly after 8 am PDT (11 am EDT). Pete Siebold piloted SS2 with Mike Alsbury as co-pilot; Sieblod, in the release, declared SS2 “a real joy to fly”.

Some details about the flight test activities from the press release:

Other detailed objectives of the flight were successfully completed, including; verification that all systems worked prior and following the clean release of Enterprise; initial evaluation of handling and stall characteristics; qualitative evaluation of stability and control of SS2 against predictions from design and simulation work; verification of performance by evaluating the lift-to-drag ratio of the spaceship during glide flight; practice a landing approach at altitude and finally descend and land.

Virgin also used the flight test to announce a four-part documentary series with the National Geographic Channel about the development of SpaceShipTwo. The first part will air next Monday, October 18, at 10 pm EDT/PDT to cover the work leading to Sunday’s glide test. Later parts of the documentary, according to the announcement, “will include SpaceShipTwo’s first rocket-powered flight; following Rutan, Branson and his two children as they make preparations for their historic flight; and being there as the spaceliner’s first passengers take their incredible trip.”

Finally, a picture below showing the release of SS2. Look carefully at the pylon between the fuselages of WK2 where SS2 was mounted. Have a nice flight?

Scaled ready to begin SpaceShipTwo glide tests

Jeff Foust — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 04:26:35 +0000

[Update 2: SpaceShipTwo has successfully completed its first glide test, landing at Mojave Air and Space Port shortly after 8 am PDT (11 am EDT) Sunday morning, a little more than 10 minutes after being released by WhiteKnightTwo.]

[Update: the first glide test is indeed taking place Sunday morning; follow along at the Popular Mechanics liveblog, reporting from Mojave.]

The long wait for the first free flight by SpaceShipTwo may nearly be over. Popular Mechanics reported Saturday that, according to its sources, Scaled will perform the first glide test as soon as Sunday morning, taking the aircraft up to an altitude of 15,000 meters (50,000 feet) and then release it. SpaceShipTwo most recently flew a captive carry flight with the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft on September 30th; according to the published test log the flight was a “rehearsal mission” for upcoming glide tests.

WhiteKnightTwo landing gear collapses

Jeff Foust — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:27:27 +0000

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 FAA spokesman told the AP that the left main landing gear, the one that collapsed, was damaged, but he did not know if there was any other damage to the aircraft. SpaceShipTwo was not attached to the aircraft during Thursday’s flight.

Scaled Composites issued a brief statement about the incident, offering few details about what happened in the “minor” incident:

A minor incident occurred on the runway at Mojave airport this morning, which involved a mechanical problem with the left hand-side landing gear of WhiteKnightTwo. No injuries were sustained and the incident did not involve the Spaceship which was not attached to WhiteKnightTwo. WhiteKnightTwo was on its 37th test flight, and has been flying since December 2008. Further information will be posted in due course.