{"id":1266,"date":"2008-01-23T14:08:36","date_gmt":"2008-01-23T14:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1266"},"modified":"2008-01-23T14:08:36","modified_gmt":"2008-01-23T14:08:36","slug":"presenting_spaceshiptwo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2008\/01\/23\/presenting_spaceshiptwo\/","title":{"rendered":"Presenting SpaceShipTwo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Rutan<\/a><\/p>\n

At the Natural History Museum in New York City this morning, gazillionaire Richard Branson<\/a> and aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan<\/a> have just unveiled the design for SpaceShipTwo, the follow-up to Rutan’s X-Prize-winning SpaceShipOne<\/a>, which, you may remember, was the first privately built, manned, and reusable vehicle to reach outer space. That’s a photo of the new spacecraft up there, slung between the twin fuselages of the White Knight 2 launch vehicle that will carry it aloft; click to embiggen and have a good, close look at the future. The White Knight 2 is said to have the same wingspan as a B-29 bomber<\/a>, while SpaceShipTwo is large enough for passengers to get up and walk around during their suborbital tourist flights. The dual vehicle will fly for Branson’s Virgin Galactic<\/a> and there are reportedly already 100 wanna-be astronauts on the waiting list.<\/p>\n

It’s unlikely the fares for this thing will ever drop low enough for anyone other than venture capitalists and trust-fund babies to take a ride, but it’s still pretty exciting. Even as we’re reading that government-funded manned space missions may never happen<\/a>, the private sector is forging ahead with its eyes on the stars. We may get there yet. If nothing else, this vehicle could open up the possibility of fast sub-orbital passenger flights around the world. Imagine flying from Los Angeles to Sydney in only a couple of hours (or less) instead of the better part of two days…<\/p>\n

Further details here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the Natural History Museum in New York City this morning, gazillionaire Richard Branson and aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan have just unveiled the design for SpaceShipTwo, the follow-up to Rutan’s X-Prize-winning SpaceShipOne, which, you may remember, was the first privately built, manned, and reusable vehicle to reach outer space. That’s a photo of the new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-final-frontier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}