With Open-Architecture Mothership, Virgin Aims To Fuel New Space Race

The Virgin Group have presented the ‘mother’ space-craft that will work as both the sky-crane for Virgin Galactic tourist passengers but also for other enterprises. Virgin plan to build 12 WhiteKnightTwo ships that will carry smaller SpaceShipTwo craft to a height where both craft detaches and after a moment of free fall, the latter will engage its rockets to ride into space - offering its passengers about 20 minutes of time in space and 6 minutes of weightlessness.

Richard Branson and his team want to offer safe, energy efficient and cheap access to space for everyone. Over 290 ‘founder’ customers have signed up for the flight - many of whom have gone beyond the $20,000 deposit and paid the whole ticket. In fact, much of the project’s funding is coming from pre-sales. At its peak, 2 sets of tourists will be sent to space each day.

Virgin Galactic plan to build 20 SpaceShipTwo craft (yet to be previewed) but see the WhiteKnightTwo mother ship’s role to extend beyond tourism duties. It will operate as a workhorse that can change the way we work and play in space. Virgin say that for too long rockets launched from sea-level have been inefficient, environmentally unsound and unsafe. Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft will be fully built from composite material that will make them the lightest flying vehicles of their size. They say that if they built the Virgin America fleet with the composite material (which they seem to want to do) they would save 50% in fuel efficiencies.

Richard Branson believes that it’s important that we get into space to counter the effects of Earth’s population boom - and he wants to share his company’s learnings. The scientists have built the spacecraft with open architecture and they want to help other companies take the materials and technology and create an industry that uses the WhiteKnightTwo as a workhorse. Other companies could be launching other craft and unmanned technology using this system. Why would Virgin want to do this? Probably for Karma. If they help create a new space race now, they should benefit in the future from the tech advancements their competitors encourage too.