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SpaceShipOne ranks among the world's first spaceplanes in the first 50 years of human spaceflight, with the North American X-15, Space Shuttle, Buran, and Boeing X-37. SpaceShipOne is the second spaceplane to have launched from a mother ship, preceded only by the North American X-15.
The White Knight and SpaceShipOne were designed by Burt Rutan and manufactured by Scaled Composites, a private company founded by Rutan in 1982. On three separate flights in 2004, White Knight conducted SpaceShipOne into flight, and SpaceShipOne then performed a sub-orbital spaceflight, becoming the first private craft to reach space.
Although not a Virgin Galactic launcher, SpaceShipOne was the direct predecessor of the Virgin Galactic vehicles, and served to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept. SpaceShipOne was an experimental air-launched rocket-powered aircraft with sub-orbital spaceflight capability at speeds of up to 3,000 ft/s (900 m/s), using a hybrid rocket ...
The Mojave Airport, operating part-time as Mojave Spaceport, is the launch point for SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipOne performed the first privately funded human spaceflight on June 21, 2004. Flight 16P on September 29, 2004, and Flight 17P on October 4, 2004, won the X-Prize for Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne.
SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two were, respectively, roughly twice the size of the first-generation SpaceShipOne and mothership White Knight, which won the Ansari X Prize in 2004. SpaceShipTwo had 43 and 33 cm (17 and 13 in)-diameter windows for the passengers' viewing pleasure, [ 30 ] and all seats reclined back during landing to decrease the ...
LauncherOne was an orbital launch vehicle that Virgin Galactic had begun working on by late 2008, [186] with the technical specifications defined in some detail in late 2009. [187] The LauncherOne configuration was proposed to be an expendable, two-stage, liquid-fueled rocket, envisaged to be air-launched from a White Knight Two . [ 188 ]
SpaceShipOne flight 16P on September 29, 2004 and SpaceShipOne flight 17P on October 4, 2004 were successful competitive flights, winning the X Prize. The Tier One program run by Scaled Composites concluded after the retirement of SpaceShipOne, transitioning to a successor program for customer Virgin Galactic.
In 2008, Virgin Galactic ordered two White Knight Two vehicles. [6] Together, WK2 and SS2 were to form the basis for Virgin Galactic's fleet of suborbital spaceplanes.. In November 2010, The Spaceship Company had announced that it planned to build at least three additional White Knight Two aircraft and an additional five SpaceShipTwo rocket planes, the aircraft to be built by Virgin after the ...