A minor incident occurred on the runway at Mojave airport this morning, which involved a mechanical problem with the left hand-side landing gear of WhiteKnightTwo.Read more
The VSS Enterprise, a suborbital spaceship designed for tourism, has successfully completed its first test flight over the western United States. The spaceship - 18 metres in length - is designed to take six passengers and two pilots to an altitude of over 110 kilometres. The passengers will experience weightlessness for a number of minutes. Read more
Sir Richard Branson will unveil the rocket plane on Monday he will use to take fare-paying passengers into space. SpaceShipTwo is being presented to the world in California, US. The vehicle will undergo testing over the next 18 months before being allowed to take ticketed individuals on short-hop trips just above the atmosphere. Read more
Hundreds of paying space tourists and travel agents, rocket geeks and glitterati have gathered in the California desert town of Mojave to see what's likely to be the first commercial suborbital spaceship up close. Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane has been under development for years in a Mojave hangar at Scaled Composites - the company that built the craft's predecessor, SpaceShipOne, to win a $10 million prize for private spaceflight five years ago. Read more
Abu Dhabi's tourism spacecraft unveiled tomorrow British billionaire Sir Richard Branson will unveil a craft on Monday that could soon carry tourists on an out-of-this-world trip into space, for a mere US$200,000 (Dh735,000). The lunar-like landscape of the Mohave Desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas will stage the roll-out of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo (SS2), the brain child of aerospace engineer Burt Rutan.
Virgin Galactic will begin test flights on its space tourism venture SpaceShipTwo in early 2010. Tests will be carried out on the small, rocket-propelled shuttle which will launch to 50,000ft above sea level by its mothership - WhiteKnightTwo. Read more