How Virgin Galactic got a plane into space

Putting the “Rocket” in Rocket Engine.

May 26, 2021

On Saturday, May 22, Virgin Galactic, owned by Billionaire Richard Branson, successfully sent their SpaceShipTwo rocket to the edge of space. Powered by traditional jet and rocket engines, this rocket-plane hybrid reached a maximum altitude of 55 miles off the surface of the Earth. This is one of the first times that a vehicle that took off horizontally, like a plane, was able to reach space. Today we’ll get into what that flight looked like, how they managed to pull it off, and most importantly, how you could get a ticket.

The vehicle started on the back of the VMS Eve, a launch platform also developed by Virgin Galactic. This aircraft is designed exclusively for carrying spacecraft to their launch altitude. Similar to the modified 747’s that transported the Space Shuttle, except this spaceship launches from the air. Launching from a high altitude as opposed to the ground can be a huge advantage. Here are the major pros and cons:

Cons:

Your spaceship has to be small. If you’re attached to something else, like a plane, it must generate enough lift to bring both itself and you up into the sky and have powerful enough engines to push you through the sir.

Pros:

You don’t need as big of a spaceship. Unfortunately, these two don’t quite cancel each other out, but for some applications, it gets close enough. SpaceShipTwo can carry 6 passengers and 2 crew members, for a total of 8 people. With all of these people, it only weighs 21,500 lbs. [2] Compare that to the SpaceX Dragon capsule, which can carry 7 people, weighs 13,000 lbs, but needs a 1.2 million lb rocket booster beneath it. [3] Note that SpaceShipTwo isn’t going nearly as high or as far as the Dragon Capsule, but nonetheless starting at 50,000 feet easily eliminates hundreds of thousands of pounds of otherwise necessary fuel.

Putting these two together, a mission “sweet spot” emerges. If you’re limited by the size of your craft, you can’t get to a stable orbit, which means eventually you’ll fall back down to Earth. If this is your goal, however, you have more leeway with fuel, and can use that extra space to add a bit of luxury. This is exactly what Virgin Galactic plans to do—luxury commercial space travel. According to spaceflightnow.com, Virgin Galactic aims to give wealthy adventure seekers uninhibited views of the edge of Earth and extended exposure to microgravity (what you’d experience on the International Space Station). But before you get your credit cards ready, wait until you hear the price.

If you were to take this journey, you’d start by taking off like any other plane. Other than the amenities and how many seatbelts you’d have to wear, your trip would feel much the same as you came up to the deployment altitude of 50,000 feet. At this point things would become very different. Your spaceship now detaches and fires it’s hybrid rocket/jet engines. This would accelerate you, as if you were taking off again, for about a minute until you reached Mach 3.5. This is very likely the fastest you will have ever gone in your life. In a regular plane you top out at Mach 0.85. So you would be going 3.5/0.85=4.12 times faster than ever before. Once you’re up to speed, things would get quiet. The engines shut off and you continue to glide to your maximum height (apogee). Like we said before this would be somewhere in the ball park of 55 miles above Earth’s surface. As you glide, you’d technically be in orbit around the Earth. As a result you’d feel weightless and enjoy views that only a handful of people have ever gotten to see.

After a while the pilots would tell you to fasten your seatbelts and prepare for landing. (just kidding—if they let you take them off they would be pretty awful at their jobs) Finally, as the atmosphere thickened, you would lose speed and the engines would kick back in; this time working much like regular plane engines. From here things would return to what you may be used to—approach, descent, and landing.

This all sounds rather lovely, really, but unfortunately there’s a catch. While Virgin Galactic does have a major competitor in Blue Origin, which no doubt drives prices lower, their competitive tickets range from $200,000 to $250,000. A quarter of a million dollars for a flight that brings you back to the same airport you started at. In the future maybe this service will have a destination, or technology advancements my lower prices, but for now to get to space as a consumer, even for a mere hour, you’ll have to cough up enough money to buy an actual house.

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