Scaled Composites Tier Two - Spacecraft - SpaceShip Two - Overview of The SS2 Spacecraft Flights

Overview of The SS2 Spacecraft Flights

It is planned that the SpaceshipTwo spacecraft will be robust and affordable enough to take paying passengers ($200,000 per person with a $20,000 deposit). As of May 2012, there are around 550 ticket-holders in line to fly with Virgin Galactic. Passengers who have already submitted their deposit include Stephen Hawking, Tom Hanks, Ashton Kutcher, Katy Perry, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Mário Ferreira. The craft is expected to accommodate six passengers and two pilots. Its planned trajectory will make it a sub-orbital journey with a short period of weightlessness. SpaceShipTwo will be carried to about 16 kilometers or 52000 ft by a carrier aircraft, White Knight II. At that point, when the carrier aircraft reaches its maximum height, the SpaceShipTwo vehicle will separate and continue to over 100 km (the Kármán line, a common definition of where "space" begins). The time from liftoff of the White Knight booster carrying SpaceShipTwo until the touchdown of the spacecraft after the sub-orbital flight will be about 2.5 hours. The sub-orbital flight itself will only be a small fraction of that time. The weightlessness will last approximately 6 minutes. Passengers will be able to release themselves from their seats during these 6 minutes and float around the cabin.

In addition to the sub-orbital passenger business, Virgin Galactic will market SpaceShipTwo for sub-orbital space science missions and market WhiteKnightTwo for "small satellite" launch services. They had planned to initiate RFPs for the satellite business in early 2010, but flights had not materialized as of 2012.