A post on Wired’s Autopia blog caught my attention yesterday: “Exclusive Video of Virgin Galactic’s Test Flight”. Wired claimed to have obtained “exclusive video of Virgin Galactic’s recent test flight” of WhiteKnightTwo. The video is here:
At first I was impressed that Wired got its hands on what presumably was video from the April 20 test flight that included a tail scrape during a tough-and-go, followed by some touchy statements from Scaled Composites in response to the reporting of the event. But as I was watching it I noticed that some of the footage looked very familiar:
This was footage released in late March by Virgin. At first I thought Wired had simply rehashed the video released in late March, but when you compare the two it’s clear that the Wired video has different clips and angles, so that’s not the case. Yet it looked familiar, and some of it seemed odd: why would someone say that this was “the day we’ve been working for” just before the fourth test flight?
As it turns out, Virgin’s Will Whitehorn played this exact same video back in February at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington. It’s based, not surprisingly, on the first test flight back in December, as the second took place just the day before Whitehorn spoke. Here’s a (low-quality, apologies) clip of that speech where Whitehorn showed the video:
One other bit of news: the Wired blog post adds that WK2 “will make its public debut next month at a fly-over during the groundbreaking for Virgin Galactic’s Spaceport America terminal.” Spaceport America officials haven’t set a date for that groundbreaking other than to say that it would be in early summer, consistent with that statement. Since there’s no runway at Spaceport America yet, the aircraft would have to take off and land somewhere else, unless it can do a non-stop roundtrip from Mojave.
Spaceport America is conducting an “educational” launch this morning of a sounding rocket built by UP Aerospace. The rocket is carrying a number of payloads provided by high schools and colleges in New Mexico, as well as secondary payloads from the Air Force and Celestis. According to the Spaceport America web site there will be a live webcast of the launch on its web site at 10 am EDT, although I haven’t seen the webcast show up yet on the site, less than a half-hour from launch.
In the last of the series of video interviews I recorded during the Space Access ’09 conference in Phoenix earlier this month, Steve Landeene, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, gives a brief update on the progress of Spaceport America and plans for its construction:
SPACE.com and Flight International both reported that WhiteKnightTwo, the carrier aircraft for SpaceShipTwo, made its fourth and longest test flight on Mon day, a four-hour flight that reached an altitude of 6,100 meters and speed of nearly 260 km/h. However, both reported on an incident during a touch-and-go approach at Mojave Air and Space Port: as the aircraft pulled up from the runway the tail boom on the port fuselage struck the runway, apparently as a result of crosswinds. There was no visible damage to the aircraft, and the flight continued. Flight International also reported that WK2 appeared to have some steering problems when taxiing after landing, needing to power up the engines on one side of the aircraft while holding the brakes on the other to straighten out the aircraft.
So is this evidence of serious design problems with the aircraft? Flight International’s Hyperbola blog suggests that Scaled Composites didn’t realize that an aircraft like this would need larger vertical fins to deal with stability issues. That is, though, part of any test flight program: put the plane through its paces to see what was overlooked and can be improved. However, as noted, it doesn’t appear likely that we’ll see WK2 carrying SS2 for even captive carry flight any time soon, regardless of the status of SS2.
Update 1 pm EDT: Scaled Composites took the rather unusual (for them) step of issuing a press release to set the record straight about Monday’s test flight and the tail-scraping incident during it. According to Scaled, “an asymmetric idle thrust setting”, and not crosswinds, caused the plan to yaw during the touch-and-go maneuver, causing the tails to scrape the runway. “Only procedural changes are required to ensure we do not experience it again,” the company stated. Scaled added that the plane’s stability is “strongly positive” in all three axes, and this summer they plan to start flying to 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), the approximate altitude SpaceShipTwo would be deployed from.
Scaled also took a swing at the media reports of the incident and the speculation that followed, calling them “sufficiently inaccurate and negative” that they warranted the press release, which Scaled issued with the permission of its customer, Virgin Galactic. “In the mean time, do be cautious of what you read if it does not come from either our flight test team or our customer,” the release concludes. “Also, to state the obvious, you should question the motivations of a publication that reports design or flight test information that is based only on speculation.”
I posted on this yesterday at Space Politics, but if you missed it there a summary of this latest, positive development regarding ITAR (US export control regulations) as they apply to space tourism is below:
The Economist reported Wednesday that regulators have agreed that prospective spaceflight participants will not need any export control agreements to fly on US suborbital or orbital vehicles. There had been concern that non-US customers might need a technical assistance agreement (TAA) in order to legally obtain technical data about the vehicles they’re flying on, including basic information that would be necessary for safety. Bigelow Aerospace asked for an exemption, arguing that, in the article’s words, “taking a passenger flight does not mean you can build an aeroplane”. The State Department apparently agrees, as Bigelow’s Mike Gold said they got “everything we could want” from the ruling, although citizens of some countries (China, Iran, North Korea, and Sudan) would be still not be allowed to fly.
In a related note, the AIAA is holding a half-day meeting titled “Entrepreneurial Space and Export Control: Red Tape in the Final Frontier” next Wednesday the 29th in Washington. Congressman C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger will be the keynote speaker, followed by panels providing the views of industry and government. Presumably this recent ruling will be one topic of discussion…
The future of the overall project in up in the air: Space Florida, which contributed half of the $500,000 to set up Project Odyssey, said it’s freezing the unspent portion of that money, $200,000. The state could seek to reclaim the other $300,000, although it’s not yet clear if they’re interested in doing so, and if they would even be able to if they wanted.
Plans for a spaceport at Cecil Field, a former naval air station outside Jacksonville, Florida, moved a step closer to reality this week with the release of a draft environmental assessment (EA) for the facility. According to the Jacksonville Aviation Authority (JAA), which is applying for a spaceport license from the FAA, the draft EA found “no significant environmental impacts” from proposed operations, which would feature up to 52 flights a year of horizontal takeoff and landing vehicles. (While the press release claims the draft EA is available on both its web site and the FAA’s, I could not find it in either location as of early Friday morning.) Comments on the draft EA are due by May 20.
What’s still uncertain is what vehicle(s) would operate from Cecil Field once it gets its spaceport license. Back in 2007 the focus was on vehicles that would take off and land under jet, not rocket power, which would include vehicle’s like Rocketplane Global’s XP but not XCOR’s Lynx. Like Oklahoma Spaceport (a former air force base), Cecil Field would not support vertical takeoff and landing vehicles.
Below is an interview I did with Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane Global during the Space Access ’09 conference in Phoenix earlier this month. Chuck talks about the current status of Rocketplane Global and the markets they’re pursuing for their suborbital vehicle. He also recaps what he said at the conference about Rocketplane Kistler and their not-yet-dead condition. (Beware of chirping birds in the first half of the video, one of the hazards of recording this outside.)
Yesterday a Canadian travel agency who is accredited to sell flights on Virgin Galactic held a press conference to provide an update on Virgin’s activities, with the message that, despite the economy, people are still interested in, and willing to pay for, suborbital spaceflights, as the Toronto Star reports today. That’s not too surprising if you’ve been following the industry, but it’s good to see it confirmed by some of Virgin’s own customers. Carolyn Wincer, head of astronaut sales at Virgin Galactic, said that commercial flights of SpaceShipTwo would begin in 2010 or “more likely 2011″, and by then (presumably), the economy will have rebounded anyway.
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