Boeing and SpaceX Selected to Build America’s New Crew Space Transportation System | The Compost Bin | Forums

Voters in the deprived region were promptly asked (and agreed) to approve special taxes to pay for the project, swayed by promises that the facility would earn their community a lucrative place in the history books.

Virgin Galactic had committed itself to launching at least 100 space flights a year from Spaceport America from 2010 onwards, they were told.

Travellers passing through would include Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt and Paris Hilton — just a few of the host of celebrities reputed to have purchased tickets for a two-hour journey, during which they would experience five minutes of weightlessness.

 

 

+7

When Branson convinced New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson to allow him to build Spaceport America in 2005, the state's residents were told 100 space flights a year would be taking place in just five years' time

By 2015, there would be 700 flights a year, with Branson’s craft blasting off from the sun-baked Tarmac twice daily. 50,000 space tourists would use the facility its first 10 years, along with hundreds of thousands of free-spending visitors.

Together, they would spend tens of millions of dollars, and create, according to Richardson, at least 3,000 new jobs by 2015. 

At the Spaceport’s official launch, in the state capital of Santa Fe in December 2005, an ebullient Branson stood at a spotlit lectern brandishing a toy spaceship.

‘We’re going where no man has gone before!’ he declared. ‘We may even be able to allow those aliens who landed at [nearby] Roswell 50 years ago in a UFO a chance to go home!’

Assembled journalists were informed that Virgin Galactic was on course to send customers into space by ‘2008 or early 2009’.

That was then. Today? Well, it’s safe to say that things haven’t turned out as planned.

 

 

+7

SpaceShipTwo (model pictured), a prototype of the craft that was supposed to be propelling customers into orbit twice daily, is grounded at a development facility in California

New Mexico dutifully managed to keep its side of the bargain. Indeed, major building work on Spaceport America was completed four years ago.

Sir Richard Branson, on the other hand, most certainly did not.

In fact, nine years after that cheery press conference, he still hasn’t taken a single tourist into space.

Six years after the proposed lift-off date, Virgin Galactic doesn’t even have a working spaceship.

Instead, SpaceShipTwo, a prototype of the craft that’s supposed to be propelling customers into orbit twice daily, is sitting on terra firma at a development facility in California.

It last took a powered test flight in January. In its three such journeys so far, it reached just 71,000ft — less than a quarter of its supposed target altitude of 320,000ft. 

A modified engine, developed this year, has yet to complete a single powered journey.

I gather, meanwhile, that Virgin Galactic’s application to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for a licence to take passengers into space has been quietly put on hold.

Customers are duly growing restless. According to a report last weekend, Sir Richard is facing a ‘backlash’ from some of the nearly 700 passengers who have already paid up to $250,000 (£153,000) for a ticket on the craft.

Some stumped up the fee as long ago as 2005, but still have no idea when they will eventually reach space.

A few have died, or grown too old for travel. Several have asked for money back, including the venture capitalist Alan Walton, who gave up on the project on his 75th birthday.

 

 

+7

The aircraft last took a powered test flight in January. In its three such journeys so far, it reached just 71,000ft — less than a quarter of its supposed target altitude of 320,000ft

Others fear Virgin Galactic, whose passenger contracts promise only to reach an altitude of 50 miles, may never be able to take passengers to its supposed target of the 60-mile-high Karman Line, an internationally accepted boundary where the Earth’s atmosphere meets Space.

‘If they don’t get above 60 miles, I will certainly be withdrawing my money,’ one customer told the Sunday Times. ‘I don’t think you can be considered an astronaut unless you cross that line.’

The firm, which has taken a reputed $80 million (£50 million) in ticket sales via roughly 140 accredited salesmen, has meanwhile parted company with high-profile staff members.

They include Jim Tighe, SpaceShipTwo’s lead designer (who left last week but will return ‘periodically’ to the project). 

Over at Spaceport America, $225 million-worth of buildings are, therefore, still sitting largely empty. Norman Foster’s snazzy terminal, which should be packed with visitors, contains little more than unfinished concrete and steel; it’s waiting to have its interior fitted out.

According to Reuters, a grand total of ten jobs have so far actually been created on the site for local residents. That’s 0.33 per cent of the number that was originally promised. And works out at $22.5 million per job.

‘It’s just a white elephant sitting out in the desert eating up taxpayer dollars,’ says Paul Gessing, of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation think tank. 

‘New Mexico is a poor state. It has some of the highest poverty levels and lowest income levels in America. And its taxpayers are now subsidising a billionaire, Richard Branson, who wants to make money flying millionaires into space.

 

 

+7

According to a report last weekend, Sir Richard is facing a ‘backlash’ from some of the nearly 700 passengers who have already paid up to $250,000 (£153,000) for a ticket on the craft

Arturo Uribe, a community activist who has long campaigned against the 0.25 per cent sales tax that residents are still paying to fund the project, adds: ‘Every time I hear that guy Branson say he’s going to fly soon, I think: “Yeah, right!” We’ve been watching this for years. Where are the jobs?’

And Dede Feldman, a former state senator who opposed the project while in office because ‘the whole thing seemed too gimmicky’, believes Virgin Galactic is now ‘getting away with highway robbery’.

Against this critical backdrop, the public utterances of Sir Richard, who has promised to be SpaceShipTwo’s first civilian passenger, are instructive.

He spent last year, for example, insisting that he would go into space on December 25, 2013, saying: ‘Maybe I’ll dress up as Father Christmas!’

Then, in February 2014, he changed tack, claiming to instead be ‘three or four months’ from lift off.

That didn’t happen, so in July, Virgin Galactic tweeted that it was ‘on the road to spaceflight later this year’.

Finally, on U.S. chat-show host David Letterman’s sofa last week, Branson remarked that he was now aiming for ‘February or March next year’.

Doubtless the 64-year-old entrepreneur believes his own promises. His sunny optimism is, after all, central to the buccaneering spirit that has, over the years, helped launch airlines, cola brands, record labels and mobile phones.

But the constantly-shifting goalposts don’t exactly inspire confidence.

Branson’s senior staff, despite recent setbacks, meanwhile remain adamant that they are in the final stages of achieving lift off.

‘When are we going to go? We have internal schedules, and I think that the answer is “soon”,’ George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s CEO, told me this week.

‘I think what you will see this autumn is a rapid series of test flights at a much higher cadence than in the past. We’ve been getting ready for this big push. So I think the answer is “months” and beyond that our general policy is to avoid setting exact dates.’

 

 

+7

SpaceShipTwo (the central fuselage) is carried by its mothership, WhiteKnightTwo

Others aren’t so sure, though. Indeed, even some of Branson’s most loyal supporters are now questioning his ability to put punters into space in the timeframe he has trumpeted.

Take Pat Hynes, the director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium. She estimates that Branson is unlikely to take tourists to space until 2018 or 2019.

‘Given their pattern of powered test flights, [with a] current timetable of eight to nine months between them, and the fact that they need at least 20 powered flights before they operate, that’s my educated guess,’ she says.

Hynes speaks as an academic expert on space travel, who strongly supports Branson’s project, saying it will help ‘make great leaps forward in human knowledge’.

‘I don’t believe he’s a Bernie Madoff figure,’ she adds, referring to the convicted fraudster behind a $65 billion (£40 billion) Ponzi scheme. 

‘Customers who have asked for their money back have got it back immediately. He’s not a conman. He wants this to happen. But I think we are looking at another four years.’

Take also Julian Bray, one of Britain’s most prominent aviation experts. He points out that Virgin Galactic has created an entirely new system of launching and powering an aircraft. 

‘Realistically, the testing and flight type-approval process could take up to a decade from the point where the initial flight cycles have been proven,’ he says.

‘You have to go back to the development of the Comet jet airliner in the late Fifties and early Sixties to get an idea of how long a completely new design and type of propulsion concept takes before fare-paying passengers are allowed on board.’

That would take us until 2024, so far beyond Virgin Galactic’s current projected start date that it feels almost laughable.

 

 

+7

The Virgin Galactic took its maiden 54-minute flight from Mojave Air and Spaceport, California, in 2010

Yet, when it comes to space tourism, Sir Richard has form for missing the mark by an awfully long way. It was 1999, for example, when he first announced he’d registered the company Virgin Galactic, and hoped to build a hotel in space.

‘I hope in five years a reusable rocket will have been developed which can take up to 10 people at a time to stay at the Virgin Hotel for two weeks,’ Branson said in a webchat. ‘I’d love to do it.’

Those five years came and went. In 2004, he called a glitzy press conference in London to announce that Virgin Galactic would soon begin signing up customers, with a view to commencing commercial space flights by 2007.

But by 2005, that timeframe had shifted to 2008. And in 2007, after three of the technicians died in an explosion during testing in California, it moved again to 2010.

In 2009, I was one of hundreds of journalists bussed into the Mojave desert to witness the unveiling of SpaceShipTwo at a star-studded party where we were served flavoured vodka in glasses made from ice.

An excited Branson told how, when flights began in 2011, SpaceShipTwo would be taken on a carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, to 48,000ft, before blasting into space under its own steam.

Passengers would experience five minutes of weightlessness, and extraordinary views of Earth, before gliding back down.

Space tourism would revolutionise travel, he claimed, allowing us one day to fly from London to Sydney, via the stratosphere, in a couple of hours.

As the craft was unveiled to beating dance music under flashing disco lights, Branson turned to the crowd: ‘Isn’t that the sexiest spaceship ever?’

Maybe. But 2011 came without him taking customers to space. 

In a TV interview on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, Branson pushed back his timetable to 2012: ‘Rocket tests are going extremely well and so I think that we’re now on track for a launch within 12 months,’ he said.

By 2012, the target had shifted to 2013, however. And, in a now-familiar pattern, it has continued to slide ever since. 

Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whitesides is adamant, however, that Sir Richard’s dream of space tourism remains within reach.

‘If you look at the universe of aerospace projects, it’s not unusual for people to be a bit optimistic,’ he said. 

‘As the CEO, and knowing what I know, I think we’re very close now. I think it’s months away. But we don’t want to rush. Our priority has always been to do things right, because this a complex project.’

Indeed. It is, after all, rocket science.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2762839/Why-thing-Branson-fired-space-ego-700-VIPs-paid-50m-tickets-orbit-But-six-years-Virgin-boss-promised-blast-space-ship-STILL-isn-t-ready.html#ixzz3DrVrE4Yu