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Blunderbirds are go
ASPIRING SPACE LINE Virgin Galactic has announced that its VSS Enterprise has boldly gone where no other bearded millionaire's space project has gone before.
Today Virgin said that the Enterprise has completed its inaugural flight from the Mojave Air and Spaceport, while attached to the back of its mothership. Ahh.
Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, said, "Watching VSS Enterprise fly for the first time really brings home what beautiful, ground-breaking vehicles Burt and his team have developed for us. It comes as no surprise that the flight went so well; the Scaled team is uniquely qualified to bring this important and incredible dream to reality. Today was another major step along that road and a testament to US engineering and innovation."
Over the next couple of years the Enterprise will take bigger flights, and Virgin said that it would progress from being carried about by another ship to flying under its own power. Thankfully this latter stage will be tackled before Virgin launches its commercial operations.
Elsewhere the UKs business secretary Lord Mandelson has got closer to earning his Darth nickname for real with the announcement that the government will fund a new UK space initiative.
Rather than try to send some of the UKs unemployed to the moon, however, the UK space agency will use space data for things like predicting the weather and understanding climate change.
Lord Mandelson, said, "The £6 billion space industry is one of Britain's real success stories. Year on year it provides more jobs both directly and indirectly to the UK workforce. This is exactly the kind of high value-added industry we need to support as we rebalance our economy, creating sustainable growth and the jobs of the future."
The new International Space Innovation Centre (ISIC) will be funded to the tune of £40m, which is just £10m more than the government has pledged for studying the semantec web.
If the accountants in the House of Commons didn't have enough to worry about already, they would assume that the world has gone mad. µ
Tags: Boffin watch
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It's called seed money. They're charging big bucks for the ride so they can try new stuff, experiment with new technologies. The more money you have, the more you can do with it.
It's not like everyone got a car when they were first invented, or rode on an airplane a little while after the Wright brothers little adventure. These things take time.
On the surface, this looks like the front door to a new age of space travel for the common Joe. But looking closer, the brief, suborbital flights will likely pass like the age of barnstorming.
Unfortunately, it is nothing more than a glorified carnival ride. Disney might have made millions from the concept but we would all know what it was before it began.
I guess it depends on how you sell it... and whether the common Joe will ever get to set a single foot closer to space than watching it on TV.