Only two days in to an investigation which was expected to take up to a year, the National Safety Transportation Board team looking in to Friday’s Virgin Galactic crash at the Mojave spaceport has made a surprising discovery, one which overturns almost all of the early assumptions about what led to the disaster. Speaking at […]
Two days after Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo broke up in the skies over the Mojave Desert, the National Transportation Safety Board “go team” is on site. B Roll video release of the accident site is beginning to reveal some aspects of the disaster which took the life of Scale Composites test pilot Michael Alsbury, badly injured […]
Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground In the second major disaster to strike commercial space in the same week, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo broke up in the air above the Mojave desert shortly after igniting its new plastic compound based hybrid motor in what would have been its first powered test flight. […]
Coming together. Image Credit: XCOR Aerospace Coming on the heels of the 10th anniversary lamentation/celebration of SpaceShipOne’s winning the Ansari XPRIZE, an event which saw more than a little criticism aimed at Virgin Galactic for its frequent delays with SpaceShipTwo, the other company racing to introduce a commercial suborbital spaceplane, XCOR, announced major progress in […]
Still Working…Still Waiting. Image Credit: Virgin Galactic Saturday, October 4th, 2014 was the ten year anniversary of the SpaceShipOne’s winning the Ansari X-Prize, a feat which built on its legacy of becoming the first privately funded, piloted “rocket” to pass the 62.5 mile high Karman line and go into suborbital space. Ten years later, on […]
Image Credit Virgin Galactic Confirming a schedule slip which comes as no surprise, Virgin Galactic is now estimating that the first passenger flight (with founder Richard Branson aboard) will not take place until February or March of 2015. 2015. The comments from the flamboyant businessman and adventurer came during an appearance with David Letterman on […]
Land Rover, in participation with Virgin Galactic, announced yesterday the latest in a series of promotions which has seen KLM and Unilever hold contests to give away a “ticket to space.” The current contest, designed to promote the new Land Rover Discovery Sport, is divided along regional lines, with video submission promoting the spirit of […]
On June 3rd, the Moscow Times reported on a new development in Space Adventure’s plan to launch two tourists on a voyage around the Moon. Having scored notable success as the first and only company to arrange tourist, or “space flight participant” trips to the International Space Station, Space Adventures has been promoting the lunar […]
Following the delivery of its first flight capable, pressurized cockpit earlier this year, XCOR continues to make steady progress in assembling its two seat Lynx sub-orbital space plane. With fellow intended space tourism provider Virgin Galactic announcing a switch in fuels for the hybrid rocket motor powering SpaceShipTwo, a change which may further delay its […]
Based on Virgin Galactic’s marketing arrangement with NBC, it’s a pretty good bet that as the company approaches its first flights, much of the breaking news will come from that source, and hopefully from Alan Boyle. So, along those lines, we learned on Friday that VG is making a switch in the hybrid fuel mixture […]
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