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by xamdam 1804 days ago
This is amazing and inspirational engineering.

Can they scale this up to taking humans & large payloads to orbit? It seems hard to run this business sustainably on millionaire tourists, 4-minute science experiments and ads. Anyone have an idea of what their business plan is?

2 comments

Today’s launch vehicle was SpaceShipTwo. The next model (SpaceShip III, revealed in March) is planned to be capable of flying London to Sydney in less than three hours.
That was the original concept, unfortunately the current SpaceShip III won't be capable of point-to-point transportation.

> "The current SpaceShip III is designed to provide just a few minutes of weightlessness and views for space tourists for Virgin Galactic, and is a production version of SpaceShipTwo, with improved maintenance and flight rate performance and does not have point to point transportation capabilities as previously envisioned in 2016."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShip_III

no, the design isn’t applicable to orbital flight