Virgin boss signs deal with Mojave Aerospace Ventures

Well it looks like Richard Branson of Virgin fame has got in the business as previously guessed with Burt Rutan:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3693020.stm



Do people think they'll be using SpaceShipOne, or Tier2, or A.N.Other?

What do you think of the price? etc..

~Dan

"Virgin Galactic", with commercial flights starting 2007-2008.

I watched the entire conference live on Sky News. Quite amazing stuff. There's obviously a market there for £100K flights, and it seems they've done their number crunching. These initial customers will subsidise the cost of refining the technology for even cheaper flights, opening a yet bigger market, with what they predict will be an "exponential" growth model.

This is more important than the rest of the X-Prize IMHO. Space technology is nothing without business, as we all know, and finally we have the business to back it up. From the man who owns a huge commercial airline company no less. This is it!

does this mean there might actually be a chance of getting to space from Great Britain! hellll yeah all sounds good to me, lets have it! Nice to see all that speculation over the years of millions of pounds in space tourism havnt fizzled out but started to fruit! Would be interesting if bigelow looked at this n thought about hooking up their inflatable habitats with all of this! so who thinks in their life time they will actally leave planet earth?

Well, Robiwan!

I hope you have the 186,000 dollars US [300,000 Ibs] to spend.
I wish I did.

If you do lack a few pence, may I suggest start a letter writing campaign
to your MPs, to pass legislation to legalize a SPACE LOTTERY in the UK.

cheerio.

this is great stuff. historical.
the begginings of the private manned space industry!!!

I read the news of the deal just before going to the forums.

The deal will cause economies of scale which will reduce the investment costs of the SpaceShipOne-versions

first by the increase of volume and number of seats
second by the number of SSOs ordered.

This in fact is a great success of the XPRIZE Foundation - and the breakthrough perhaps.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

Things are moving along, indeed. Also, private orbital flights and even hotels might become reality in a not-too-distant future, with the help of a new space prize:

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/bi ... 40927.html

Exciting times. I wonder if this is how it must have felt for those who lived during the childhood of flight...

Saw Branson (or at least Virgin Galatic) made the front page of a major French daily and got a CNN spot, both this morning. At least the profile is coming back up again ... however, and I may have missed it, I don't think CNN mentioned SS1's up-and-coming X-prize flight at all.

DKH

It will be and I certainly hope there will be more CEOs/Corporations willing to spend big $ € ... on space tourism. Imagine it's the year 2010 ... not a long wait for what I think will be amazing times ... Zzzzzz

we are living exciting times indeed.if this deals go to fruition, years from now 2004 will be referred to as the first year of the "second(true) space age"

either way, its a great time

Hold on, hold on,

RB has been known to use speculative announcements to promote his brand in the past. He offered to by BA's old concordes, for example. This is probably good, but I can t help being suspicous of his commitment.

Blue skies and soft landings,

Dave H.

If it's related to Burt Rutan, you can trust him.. they had several projects in the past and they all became reality

And it wasn't his fault, they just didn't wanted to sell him those concordes.

£ not lbs



Im sure Richard Branson is not making it up, as said above, the reason he couldnt buy Concorde is because BA wouldnt sell them. They clearly didnt want anyone to make a success of concorde ( so they wouldnt look bad )

As I realized late this moment the Branson deal contribute a very big part to the amortization of the investment into SpaceShipOne.

The first amortization rate is the XPRIZE if the next or the at least the third flight is successful (I trust it will). This rate is 10 million dollars.

According to www.xprizenews.org the deal gets Scaled/Mojave 14 million english pounds - I don't know what's that in dollars today but it's around 10 million dollars too I suppose.

So Mojave Aerospace will have nearly 20 millions back after they have won the prize and got the monay from Branson.

This short time of amortization will increase the interest of other teams and firms to construct and build private manned spacecrafts all over the world I think.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)