SpaceShipTwo mothership to be unveiled July 28

BEIJING, June 23 (Xinhuanet) -- Subortibal tourism firm Virgin Galactic on July 28 will reveal the first WhiteKnight Two mothership for its planned fleet of SpaceShipTwo spaceliners designed by aerospace veteran Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites.

SpaceShipTwo is a reusable air-launched suborbital spacecraft derived from Rutan's 10 million U.S. dollar Ansari X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne design. Virgin Galactic has ordered five SpaceShipTwos and two of their immense WhiteKnightTwo motherships, the first of which has been christened "Eve" after Branson's mother and will be unveiled at a Scaled hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, Calif.

"We'll be rolling this carrier out of the hangar for the first time on July 28, and shortly afterward it will start its test program," Virgin Galactic commercial director Stephen Attenborough said during the 2008 Space Business Forum held by the non-profit Space Foundation. "It will be the world's largest all carbon composite aircraft ... it breaks all sorts of records."

With a unique dual-boom design, Rutan's WhiteKnightTwo sports a wingspan of about 140 feet (42 meters) with each outboard cabin mounted about 25 feet (7.6 meters) from its centrally moored SpaceShipTwo payload. About 254 people have paid a total of about 36 million dollars in down payments to assure their SpaceShipTwo seats once the spacecraft begins operational flights. The suborbital vehicle itself is slated to be unveiled early next year, Virgin Galactic officials have said.

The carrier craft is also designed with the capability to haul unmanned rockets in place of a crew-carrying vehicle, and could one day be used to launch low Earth orbiting satellites or even cargo into space, Attenborough said. With its 18-inch (46-cm) windows and roomy 7.5-foot (2.2-meter) wide cabin, SpaceShipTwo could also be used for suborbital science experiments in addition to leisure trips, he added.

"We built a big spaceship," Attenborough said. "It's going to have plenty of room in there for the scientists and the experiments they're going to do in there."

(Agencies)