Virgin SpaceShip
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| Founded | 2004 | ||||||
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| Operating bases |
Spaceport America Mojave Air & Space Port Long Beach Airport |
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| Parent company | Virgin Group | ||||||
| Headquarters | Long Beach, California | ||||||
| Key people |
Richard Branson (Chairman) George Whitesides (CEO) |
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| Website | www |
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Virgin Galactic is a spaceflight company within the Virgin Group. It is developing commercial spacecraft and aims to provide suborbital spaceflights to space tourists and suborbital launches for space science missions. Virgin Galactic plans to provide orbital human spaceflights as well.SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic's suborbital spacecraft, is air launched from beneath a carrier airplane known as White Knight Two.
Virgin Galactic's founder, Sir Richard Branson, had initially suggested that he hoped to see a maiden flight by the end of 2009, but this date has been delayed on a number of occasions, most recently by the October 2014 in-flight loss of SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise.
Virgin Galactic was founded in 2004 by British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, who had previously founded Virgin Atlantic airline and the Virgin Group, and who had a long personal history of balloon and surface record-breaking activities. As part of Branson's promotion of the firm, he has added a variation of the Virgin Galactic livery to his personal business jet, the Dassault Falcon 900EX "Galactic Girl" (G-GALX).
The Spaceship Company (TSC) was founded by Branson through Virgin Group (which owned 70%), and Lee Family from Hong Kong owned 30%, to build commercial spaceships and launch aircraft for space travel. From the time of TSC’s formation in 2005, the launch customer was Virgin Galactic, which contracted to purchase five SpaceShipTwos and two WhiteKnightTwos; Scaled Composites was contracted to develop and build the initial prototypes of WK2 and SS2, and then TSC began production of the follow-on vehicles beginning in 2008. By July 2014, TSC was only halfway through the completion of a second SpaceShipTwo, and had commenced construction of a second WhiteKnightTwo.
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Wikipedia