Future
The program name "Tier One" raises the question of what Tier Two will be.
In The Space Review on June 21, 2004 (the day of Tier One's first spaceflight), Rutan was quoted as stating "The spaceship is model number 316 and the White Knight is model number 318. I will be making a presentation very quick of a model number 346.". Whether this refers to a prototype orbital craft, a suborbital tour bus, or some other concept remains to be seen.
In 2004 Rutan suggested that a ten-passenger suborbital spacecraft would make a profitable tour bus. On September 27, 2004, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson announced a deal with Mojave Aerospace Ventures to carry paying passengers on suborbital tourist flights, using a scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne, possibly beginning service in 2008. That same year, Burt Rutan also said "we're heading for orbit sooner than you think".
During an interview in the documentary Black Sky: The Race For Space, Rutan stated that Tier One will cover suborbital flights, Tier Two will cover orbital flights, and Tier Three will cover flights beyond Earth's orbit (including flights to the moon and other planets). In the same documentary he displayed designs for an orbital craft based on SpaceShipOne, which had a rocket roughly twice SpaceShipOne's length mounted to the ship's rear.
Read more about this topic: Scaled Composites Tier One
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“[With the Union saved] its form of government is saved to the world; its beloved history, and cherished memories, are vindicated; and its happy future fully assured, and rendered inconceivably grand.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others—into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)