Virgin Galactic is teaming with NASA Ames Research Center to develop hypersonic aircraft for space tourism. To be hypersonic, an aircraft needs to sustain speeds faster tha 5 times the speed of sound. This is around 3000 miles per hour!
Virgin Galatic is well-poised for such a feat as they have exclusive rights to develop the designs of Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites who in 2004 won the Ansari X-Prize by launching SpaceShipOne to an altitude of 100 km twice in a two week time span. I was fortunate to see the test flight of SpaceShipOne earlier that summer.
More info at NASA Ames, and National Geographic.
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
Posted under Exploration, Inventions
This post was written by drknuth on March 22, 2007
I call Bullshit.
VA’s announcment is self-promoting hype and that’s a fact jack.