Tag: VIRGINGALACTIC

Virgin Galactic took a major step toward realizing the dream of commercial space travel yesterday when its SpaceShipTwo craft gracefully landed at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The landing marked the first piloted glide flight for the SpaceShipTwo, or VSS Enterprise, which was released from its mothership VSS Eve at an altitude of 45,000 feet. Manned by Pete Siebold and Mike ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... Google Chrome continues to dramatically climb the browser charts, so it wouldn't seem particularly necessary for the company to utilize wacky ad campaigns. Yet, the new Chrome speed test vids are pretty dang impressive. Even though the always popular YouTube cannon demonstrations may seem somewhat blasé and overplayed, the ...

It's happening, people! Get your light sabers ready and throw on your Princess Leia cinnamon buns because we will soon be rocketing through space. That is, if we can each come up with the $200K needed to buy a ticket on SpaceShipTwo. But Spaceport America is now more of a reality than a aeronautical dream, which means that we will only have to travel to New Mexico to hop aboard a real-life space ...

Back in the summer of 2008, Virgin Galactic unveiled its WhiteKnightTwo spacecraft, a carrier designed to piggyback the world's first commercial space-liner. Today, after months of anticipation, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson finally revealed the actual craft that the WhiteKnightTwo will jettison into space. According to Engadget, Virgin hopes that the shuttle known as SpaceShipTwo will ...

Spaceport America is officially under construction, and, according to those involved with the project, the world will have its first commercial spaceport by late 2010, or early 2011. This past Friday, Governor Bill Richardson was on hand to break ground in New Mexico for the operational headquarters of Virgin Galactic, and eventually other space tourism and transportation companies. Virgin CEO ...

It looks like the Mojave Desert is once again the center of the private space industry, with Richard Branson and crew on hand to unveil Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo spaceship carrier as promised. This craft (only the first of more that are promised) has been named EVE (after Branson's mother) and, with a 140-foot wingspan, it's apparently now officially the largest all carbon-composite ...

While much of the attention surrounding Virgin Galactic's race to space tourism has surrounded its SpaceShipTwo, word has come that carrier ship WhiteKnightTwo will rollout in late July, and after some ground tests, take to the skies by September. With this rollout come some new details about the composite, twin-boom mothership, which Virgin Galactic is selling as an "open architecture" that it ...

If you were ponying up $100,000-per-seat for you and someone special to take a ride on Richard Branson's SpaceShipTwo into the outer atmosphere, chances are it'd be a moment that you'd have a hard time forgetting. That said, some couples are taking things a bit further to make that journey a memorable one. One as-yet-identified couple has plans to get married while out there, and it looks like ...

At a press conference on Wednesday, a space tourism outfit known as Virgin Galactic showed off models of its privately developed spacecraft that will take paying customers on zero-G, suborbital flights in the next few years. The Associated Press reports that Richard Branson, a British Howard Hughes minus the neuroses, plans on flying customers approximately 62 miles above sea level – just ...

We're still a number of years away before commercialized space flight becomes a reality. The day will come when you'll be able to write a check and hop on a craft that'll rocket you out of the stratosphere (without having to learn Russian). In the meantime, Virgin Galactic is forging ahead with plans to start construction of Spaceport America next year. As part of the buildup, they've released ...