[edit] This site was an experiment and as of April 7th, 2009 is no longer accepting changes. It is kept up for archival and reference purposes. New work is ongoing in the direction of having a Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop instead of a Halo Semantic MediaWiki.

Virgin Galactic

From Oscomak

Jump to: navigation, search

One half of the company that started as an April Fool's Day joke by Google for 2008 called Project Virgle, Virgin Galactic is a real company that is attempting to bring affordable space travel to the masses now.

Contents

The Company

Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group wholly owns and operates the company, and has worked with New Mexico's government to put through legislation establishing the world's first commercial spaceport in the New Mexico desert. The spaceport is to be built by the state of New Mexico, of a design co-developed with Virgin Galactic, and will be run under the model of current airports, with Virgin Galactic leasing space from the spaceport for ticketing, takeoff, and landing use.

The Spaceship

The spaceship that will be used is a descendant of the Ansari X-Prize winning design by Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites. Virgin Galactic is the sole licensee of his design, and several members of Scaled Composites have been given prominent positions in Virgin Galactic.

With Virgin Galactic's support, the prototype that first won the X Prize and Virgin Group's attention has been updated and refined into the current WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo, which recently had its first production run finish with the Eve and the VSS Enterprise. Virgin Galactic is currently performing safety tests with their newly constructed space ship, and is scheduled to begin commercial flights late in 2009. First flight tickets have already been sold, and cost $200,000 USD each, but after the first three rounds of flights, ticket prices are scheduled to fall to $20,000 USD, which represent 10% and 1% respectively of the average government-run space ticket of $2 million USD. Virgin Galactic hopes to eventually drop the price to a level equivalent to a luxury boat cruise.

Relation to Virgle and OpenVirgle

A video by sir Richard Branson on the Virgle joke site lent it a large part of its believability before it was made public that Virgle was a joke. Efforts continue by OpenVirgle senior membership (Doram) to contact Virgin and Google to confirm/deny OpenVirgle's right to use the name, and in the hopes of future collaboration, especially with Virgin Galactic.

References

Statistics from Wikipedia

Name Value
company name Virgin Galactic
company logo Image hosted at Wikipedia
company type Private
company slogan Space is Virgin territory
foundation 2004
location New Mexico, USA
key people Richard Branson(UK)
Will Whitehorn
number of employees 30
owner Virgin Group
industry Space tourism
homepage Virgin Galactic

Websites