White Knight 2 in Mojave and Oshkosh
 I'm packing up to head to California for the rollout of Virgin Galactic's White Knight 2, built by Scaled Composites. White Knight 2 is a B-29-sized four-engine jet made of carbon fiber composites that was designed to carry an 8-seat spaceship called SpaceShipTwo to high altitude. Once there, the spaceship will drop from between White Knight 2's twin booms to fire its rocket engine for a Mach-3 run to space. Virgin Galactic has already sold more than $20,000,000 worth of tickets to suborbital space at $200,000 each, and some of the future passengers will be on hand in Mojave for the unveiling, along with Virgin chief Richard Branson, White Knight and SpaceShip designer Burt Rutan, and a cadre of Virgin airline pilots training for the job of spaceline pilot. The rollout is schedule for 7:30 a.m. Monday, July 28 in Mojave. Watch this space for my reporting on it. Afterwards, Branson and Rutan are heading to the EAA AirVenture Convention at Oshkosh, where they'll give a couple of presentations on White Knight 2. Here's the schedule, as given to me by the Scaled media rep: Presentation 1: Tuesday, July 29, Pavillion #7, 1:00 p.m. Presentation 2: Tuesday, July 29 (same day), Theatre in the Woods, 9:00 p.m. Unfortunately for Oshkosh attendees, the White Knight 2 will stay behind in Mojave. Labels: Oshkosh, Scaled Composites, Spaceflight, SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic, White Knight 2
XCOR and Rocket Racing League at Oshkosh
 The media reps at XCOR Aerospace and the Rocket Racing League (RRL) have just filled me on on their plans for demo flights and presentations at the EAA AirVenture Convention at Oshkosh, Wisconsin. XCOR's engineers have been hard at work perfecting the Rocket Racing League's first X-Racer, a rocket-powered racing airplane, and now they're ready for demonstration flights at Oshkosh. Here's the schedule: Flight 1: Tuesday, July 29, 2:30 p.m., following a 2:10 p.m. press conference Fight 2: Friday, August 1, 2:30 p.m. Flight 3: Saturday, August 2, 2:30 p.m. All flights will be flown by Rick Searfoss, a former Space Shuttle commander now serving as XCOR and the RRL's chief test pilot. "And in addition," the RRL rep tells me, "the Rocket Racing League exhibit/booth on Aero Shell Square will feature the RRL simulators, games, and other great stuff for all ages." XCOR chief engineer Dan DeLong and company president Jeff Greason will also give three separate presentations on the company's future as a commercial spaceship developer. I'm sure their spaceship-in-development, the Lynx, will feature prominently. Here's the schedule for those events: Presentation 1: Monday, July 28, 2:30 p.m. Presentation 2: Saturday, August 2, 1:00 p.m. Presentation 3: Sunday, August 3, 11:30 a.m. Labels: Oshkosh, Rocket Racing League, Spaceflight, XCOR
On the Fox Business Network
 Look for me on the Fox Business Network this Monday morning, July 21, at 7:30 a.m. on a breakfast show hosted by Charles Payne. I'll be on in the studio for a few minutes to talk about the emerging commercial spaceflight industry, including news from Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace and a new edition of my book Rocketeers. Watch this space for a link to the segment after it airs.... ---Update on July 21--- Not quite as much time as I had hoped for for the segment--they seem to have been running late and had to truncate the time alloted to it. Still, they brought in Diane Murphy, veteran space business communications executive and SpaceX's new communications director via satellite. She was in excellent form, in spite of having to appear in a Los Angeles studio at 4:00 a.m. Nice job, Diane! Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to plug the new edition of my book Rocketeers. Watch for a post about that soon. Labels: Fox Business Network, Michael Belfiore, Spaceflight, SpaceX
"Big announcement" coming from XCOR Aerospace
The folks at XCOR Aerospace tell me that the company is planning a press event on March 26 in Los Angeles. These guys are not prone to frivolous or gratuitous PR, so I'm most definitely intrigued. Come to think of it, I don't think XCOR has ever held a press conference in the time I've been following them, since 2004. The engineers, technicians, and managers at XCOR prefer to keep their heads down, do their work, and let their deeds speak for themselves. They've already built and flown a rocket powered airplane, a 7,500-pound-thrust methane rocket engine for NASA (through prime contractor ATK), novel piston fuel pumps designed to replace million-dollar turbo pumps in high-powered rocket engines at a tiny fraction of the cost, and built countless rocket engines to show again and again that liquid fueled rocket engines can be safe, reliable, and affordable enough to become part of our everyday lives. But the company was founded to get people into space, and the founders have never lost sight of that prize, wrangling contracts from the Department of Defense, NASA, and private companies to build components of their planned suborbital spaceship as well as fund components of the ship for which they don't have customers. A mysterious project has been underway on the XCOR shop floor behind a black curtain for some time now, and the company has been incredibly successful lately, with contracts and money rolling in faster than ever before. In fact, XCOR made Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest growing companies in America last year. Are we about to witness a new private spaceship unveiled? I'm going to blog the XCOR press event for the Popular Science website at www.popsci.com. Look for a link from here on March 26. Labels: Lynx, Popular Science, Spaceflight, XCOR
 I've just had a note from Tim Pickens, CEO of Orion Propulsion, pointing me to the latest news posed on his company's website announcing a contract from Bigelow Aerospace. Orion will build thrusters for Bigelow's planned first commercial space station. Bigelow's booming along on an excellerated schedule to launch its Sundancer space station by 2010. Orion's focus is on "selling shovels to the miners," as Pickens puts it, i.e., providing the means for other companies to reach space quickly and affordably to find whatever profits they may find there--or not to profit at all; Orion is also building thrusters for NASA's next planned crew launcher, the Ares 1, through a contract with prime contractor Boeing. To get the Bigelow contract, Orion built and tested a prototype thruster and sent it to Bigelow along with a written proposal. Given Robert Bigelow's impatience with paper designs created at the expense of actual working hardware, that seemed a prudent move on Orion's part, but it also reflects the way Orion prefers to do business too. Labels: Bigelow Aerospace, Orion Propulsion, Spaceflight
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I've just return from Mojave to Los Angeles via a specially chartered Virgin America flight for reporters to witness the rollout of Virgin Galactic's White Knight 2.
