Virgin Galactic sees demand for premium million-dollar packages for sub-orbital space tourism. They will first expand to spaceports on every continent.
They want to expand their system and integrate with regular air ports.
They want to get to high-speed point to point travel. They have the potential to fly anywhere in the world within an hour.
SOURCES- Virgin Galactic, CNBC
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Are you referring to the Concorde had a good safety record. I don’t know of any other plane where only a single one failed.
If it’s to the rocket plane then that error has been fixed. This happens with most developmental aircraft.
What a rude person.
Boring!
What about a complete virtual reality, orbital trip around the moon and back? Cheaper and safe.
So it did disintegrate once because of pilot error. No need to worry? I’m not worried because I have no interest in death-trip travel.
The nitrous oxide didn’t explode, they were killed by flying shrapnel from the pressure vessel failure.
That’s the idea!
What about the time the engine blew up and killed three engineers on the ground? Nitrous oxide is kinda inherently dangerous as an oxidiser, it decomposes exothermically, causing autoignition.
NBF has long had a problem with reporting aspirational statements as though they were established fact.
I mean the press releases are probably doing the obfuscation, but a reporter should be separating them back out again.
Uh, maybe, that’s quite a leap from what they are doing now. Branson had said 200k a seat, now it has to be a million? For 5 minutes? I’ll never see this for me. Uber rich, get to have a new look at the world? Well, hopefully it changes them like it does for astronauts. Then they can do some good for the world with their wealth.
I think they added a safety latch.
Wish them luck, but a lot could go wrong.
I wonder if they will be required to ride the Vomit Comet first.
Yes. No need to worry, they promised future pilots will first wait for the craft to slow down before activating of the air brake. It was the premature activation of the air brake that caused the rapid unscheduled disassembly of the craft.
Back in the day I was able to travel on both British Airways and Air France Concorde SST carriers and visited the cockpit of both during the flight. In hindsight it was an interesting travel experience, but not necessarily any more exciting than any other form of air travel. The highlights were as follow: a display in the cabin showed real time mach speed that at some point in the flight exceeded mach 2, the windows were warm to the touch from air friction, at 60K feet the horizon had a slight curvature and it was broad daylight 40 minutes before the midnight landing. Other amusing things were: They did not let me board a NY to Paris flight because I was wearing a tank top, so I had to retreive my bag and pull out a Miami Vice sports coat; the cabin and seats were as dimensionally cramped as a 3rd class Greyhound bus, the menu usually included Soviet Beluga caviar, and the flight attendants kept walking down the ailse handing out Concorde bling like wallets and vanity bags. On one BA flight the pilot briefed the passengers on the capabilities of the plane telling them it could handly like a jet fighter and he actually did some daring swerving maneuvers with it. Still an avid traveller and today I shop the best deals on google flights.
Current one could prob go ~1,000 miles horiz if not so high vert
I am guessing that is aspirational. It is in the context of million dollar premium packages. Since that photo clearly states they charge $250k for a sub-orbital flight, that would be something different.
However, it would be very different unless they are going to buy the Stratolauncher because something that can go anywhere in the world is going to be much larger. Even for one or two passengers.
You’d have to pay me a lot to travel on that death trap. Didn’t it disintegrate once?
‘Anywhere in the world within an hour’ ??? This craft is for up and down only, it is unable to go anywhere horizontally….