The Virgin Galactic fleet continues to grow as the second spaceship achieved a construction milestone on Tuesday ahead of company aspirations to begin its first space tourism flights this year.
The unnamed sister ship to the VSS Unity is nearing completion having achieved “weight on wheels,” in which the the spacecraft sat on its own landing gear holding its own weight for the first time.
The composite structure of the second SpaceShipTwo craft is 90 percent complete, according to officials with The Spaceship Company, a subsidiary of publicly traded Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc., which is constructing it and up to three more by 2023 at a facility in Mojave, California.
“Weight on wheels is an important milestone because it gets us closer to having an operational fleet of spaceships,” said Enrico Palermo, president of The Spaceship Company. “This is a critical milestone in the build of any airplane or any spaceship because it signifies major structural assembly is complete.”
The new spaceship will now go through a series of ground tests to ensure its safety before beginning flight tests. VSS Unity has already completed two test flights past its target altitude of 50 miles above the Earth.
50 miles is the threshold the Air Force deems as having made it into space. A December 2018 test flight of VSS Unity earned its two pilots commercial astronaut wings from the Federal Aviation Authority. A followup flight in February 2019 took two pilots and the first test passenger above the 50 mile threshold, also earning them their commercial astronaut wings.
The altitude falls short of the Karman line, an internationally accepted threshold for space, which is 100 km, or 62 miles above the surface of the Earth. Competing commercial space travel company Blue Origin will feature missions on its New Shepard rocket that take its customers past the Karman line.
Still, Virgin Galactic has more than 600 customers signed up for its flights, and even as the second spaceship nears completion, the company is already 50 percent complete on the structural build for the third SpaceShipTwo with a business plan to have five complete by 2023, Palermo said.
“It’s an incredibly exciting time for the team,” he said. “For the first time on the shop floor here … you see a fleet of spaceships.”
Virgin Galactic was founded by Richard Branson as part of his expanded travel empire that will also see the debut of the Virgin Voyages cruise company’s first ship Scarlet Lady in March. Florida’s high-speed train Brightline recently partnered Virgin Group, which also runs Virgin Hotels and Virgin Atlantic, and had its name changed to Virgin Trains USA as well.
While the company has not announced the exact date for its paying customers to take the first commercial flight, the official company statement is it anticipates it to come in 2020. The price is about $250,000 a ticket. Branson has said he’ll be on the first flight.
When flights do begin, the SpaceShipTwo has room for up to six passengers in addition to two pilots on flights that have taken about 15 minutes from launch to landing.
While the trip up sees the spacecraft hitting Mach 3, once the ship cuts its engine, those on board experience several minutes of weightlessness before the return trip to Earth. On descent, the SpaceShipTwo enables its feather configuration, which is a method so the craft’s shape transforms into something similar to a badminton shuttlecock with wings rotating up. On descent, the craft looks more like the capsules used by astronauts in the Apollo missions coming back to Earth.
This allows for a safer way in dealing with the heat stress of re-entry. Once the craft is safely within a lower range of Earth’s atmosphere, the wings rotate back into place allowing for the craft to glide back to a landing strip in the same manner that the space shuttle program did at Kennedy Space Center and other NASA facilities.
While the company has performed several supersonic test flights of VSS Unity, the company’s space tourism plans took a hit in 2014 when the original SpaceShipTwo crashed over the Mojave Desert killing one of two test pilots. The National Transportation Safety Board said that crash occurred because the copilot had opened the “feather” system too early. That ship was built by Scaled Composites, which is owned by Northrop Grumman Corp. The new ships are all built by The Spaceship Company.
Flights will take place from a new facility called the Gateway to Space located at Spaceport America in Las Cruces, New Mexico. This will also be the home for the completed Virgin Galactic fleet. That includes space for two of the company’s carrier aircraft, dubbed WhiteKnightTwo planes and five of the SpaceShipTwo vehicles. Already on site is the VMS Eve, with its 140-foot wingspan. This is the airplane that has carried the SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity on several test flights.
The second SpaceShipTwo won’t venture to New Mexico until it’s ready for test flights. Its next steps are for teams to integrate the flight control systems and sign off on its structural integrity, then go through ground testing.
“Reaching the weight on wheels milestone considerably faster than was achieved for VSS Unity is a huge accomplishment and is a testament to the growing expertise and capabilities of the company,” said George Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic in a press release. “We now have two spaceships that are structurally complete, with our third making good progress. These spaceships are destined to provide thousands of private astronauts with a truly transformative experience by performing regular trips to space.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article misstated that Virgin had acquired Brightline. Virgin Group is in a strategic partnership with Brightline that involves its name change to Virgin Trains USA.
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