Scaled Composites Tier One - Commercial Aspects

Commercial Aspects

The stated objective of the Tier One program is to demonstrate suborbital human spaceflight operations at low cost. Before Burt Rutan began considering this project, there were three major barriers to the goal of affordable suborbital spaceflight:

1. the dangers and costs of liquid propulsion fuels (they explode);
2. the uncontrollable nature of solid fuel rocket motors (you can't turn them off);
3. the difficulties in getting back without burning up in the atmosphere.

Rutan's design appears to provide a cost-effective solution to all three issues.

Tier One itself is not intended to carry paying passengers, and US Government permits would be required if it did intend to do so. It is a technology testbed, and it is expressly intended that the technology developed in the program will later be used in commercial spaceflights. To that end, Paul Allen and Burt Rutan created a company, Mojave Aerospace Ventures, which owns the project's intellectual property and will manage all commercial exploitation of it.

Scaled Composites initially expressed a hope that by about 2013 it would be possible for members of the public to experience a suborbital flight for about the price of a luxury cruise. On September 25, 2004 a deal was struck with Virgin Galactic to develop the Virgin SpaceShip based on a scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne. These spacecraft will be built by The Spaceship Company.