Rutan comes up with another clever name
Burt Rutan is a brilliant designer, a technological innovator, and a genius of the first rank. He is not, however, nearly as clever at coming up with clever names for things. He and eccentric British billionaire Sir Richard Branson have teamed up to form - wait for it -
Inelegant naming conventions aside, this is wicked good news. The new company will be co-owned by Rutan's Scaled Composites and Branson's Virgin Galactic. It will license the rocket and reentry technology first used on SpaceShipOne from Paul Allen's Mojave Aerospace, and will own the designs for White Knight 2 and SpaceShipTwo now under development at Scaled Composites.
The new model mother ship and space ship will have greater range and payload capacity than the originals (which will be installed at the Air and Space Museum this fall - I need to bug Dad to get me into that event.) Virgin Galactic wil recieve two of the WK2's and five of the SS2's, with options on future production; guaranteeing them at least a 18 month monopoly on private spaceflight.
All the crying about NASA's inability to figure out what's wrong with the space shuttle - in both the particular fuel sensor and detaching foam as well as the general why are we spending so goddamned much money on thirty year old technology - maybe turn out to be whining about safety standards for buggy whips a hundred years ago. Private industry could very well make NASA (with the exception of the deep space probes) completely moot, and soon.
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B,
B,
The Ru-tan Clan has spectacularly demonstrated that it is quite significantly smarter and more capable than much of the rest of humanity. By at least a half-dozen measures, anyway.
So...recognizing that, and with all due props and ups...about those names...what the hell?
Lets just Branson keeps
Lets just Branson keeps enough cash around so he can buy NASA when they privitise the bloated pig.