How Virgin Galactic Plans to Open Space Travel to the Masses - Mashable
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In the 50 years since the Russians sent the first man into orbit (Yuri Gagarin), a total of 517 people have flown in space.
Think about it: More people tweeted about Beyonce's unborn baby in a single second than have visited outer space in 50 years. After half a century, the final frontier is still a wilderness that few have had the opportunity to visit for themselves. That's because space exploration has been the domain of national governments, whose large budgets could sustain infrequent trips beyond the atmosphere.
The human race thrives on exploration of the unknown though. That thirst for exploration drove the Romans across Europe, sent the Europeans across the ocean and motivated pioneers to traverse the American wilderness with only a wagon and some oxen. And with every inch of land on Earth now catalogued by our satellites, the stars are the next place we as a species must travel. And with a booming world population that will hit 9.1 billion in 2050, large-scale space travel may become a necessity.
That's where the private sector comes in. With the U.S. Space Shuttle fleet now retired, it's up to private companies to find to make space exploration accessible not just to the wealthiest few, but to all of mankind. It's up to these companies to turn space into a legitimate business.
Mashable spoke with Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides about how he and his company are pushing technological innovation forward in aerospace. We spoke about the challenges facing commercial space travel, the private space race and what is in store for the future of humanity.
A Video Introduction to Virgin Galactic & Private Space Travel
Virgin Galactic & Its Mission
"Our vision, which flows from Richard Branson's vision, is to open space to humanity," Whitesides says about the company's goal. He explains that while space organizations have done some incredible things in the last 50 years, they haven't focused on making space more available to vastly more people.
Virgin Galactic, established in 2004, has been a pet project of Richard Branson, the well-known multi-billionaire entrepreneur. After the successful flight of SpaceShipOne, the first private spacecraft to take a person into space, Branson's Virgin Galactic and Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites created a joint venture called The Spaceship Company.
Combined, the three companies would create a fleet of spacecraft modeled after SpaceShipOne, designed to take ordinary people into suborbital space. The hope is that the partnership will be able to create ships that send people deeper into space and open up new possibilities such as point-to-point travel (getting a person across the world in a fraction of the time it would take in an airplane) and commercial habitation in space.
First though, Virgin Galactic and its partners must accomplish its immediate goal: to establish regular suborbital spaceflights from Spaceport America in New Mexico.
"We're well on the way," Whitesides quickly notes.
Innovation and Challenges
Of course, the big reason why we don't have space colonies and regular trips to the moon is that flying into outer space is just plain hard. The business of safely transporting people off the Earth is a costly affair that requires a lot of technology.
Whitesides sees three challenges in commercial spaceflight: safety, operations and reusability. Without all three, private spaceflight simply isn't sustainable.
The most important issue is safety. "If we don't have a safe product, we don't have a product," Whitesides says. To that end, Virgin Galactic has worked tirelessly to develop the "safest and simplest" form of ascent possible, one of that relies on traditional airplane technology for the first 50,000 feet and the last 50,000 feet. An array of patented technologies, such as its feathering mechanism with a failsafe reentry mode, only add to SpaceShipTwo's safety protections.
The second and third challenges, operations and reusability, are directly related to each other. Whitesides stresses that Virgin Galactic is a business — it needs to make money on its flights. In order to do that, it needs to be efficient, and it needs to be able to make more than a few flights per year.
"We have to be able to fly a lot, and that will in turn drive down costs," he explains, adding that Virgin Galactic's vehicles have to be "closer in reusability to an airplane than a spacecraft."
"We have a big incentive to increase efficiency over time."
The Future of Space Travel
If Virgin Galactic can succeed at creating a fleet of spaceships that can bring hundreds or thousands of people into space on a regular basis, Whitesides believes it would change humanity.
"It recasts our relationship with the universe," Whitesides explains, noting that he grew up in an era where space was the realm of the few and the elite. He believes that commercial spaceflight would change how we live and how we travel.
One specific thing Whitesides points out is the overview effect, "a transcendental, euphoric feeling of universal connection reported by some astronauts during spaceflight." To date, only a few hundred people have had the opportunity to feel the impact of the overview effect, which Virgin Galactic's CEO believes could change humanity for the better because looking down upon the earth creates a sense of "oneness" with the planet and the rest of humanity.
On a more practical level, successful spaceflight opens the door to faster travel and more exploration. Point-to-point transit via low orbit could dramatically speed up international flights, connecting the world even further. And safe, consistent space travel opens up the possibility of commercial space stations, trips to the moon and exploration beyond.
The journey of making space travel as common as an airplane flight starts with Spaceport America and the first flights of SpaceShipTwo. While it will cost you a pretty penny ($200,000) to book a flight on one of Virgin Galactic's ships now, the hope is that the cost will dramatically drop as private companies become more efficient at getting people out of Earth's atmosphere.
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16 Sep, 2011--
Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNH-WrFAHzRB6huf-kA82uKIQFAfZQ&url=http://mashable.com/2011/09/16/virgin-galactic-interview/
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