Virgin Galactic doesn't have any orbital aspirations, as far as I know (unlike Virgin Orbit). The biggest change I saw was they floated the possibility of actually traveling this way- e.g. London to New Mexico or somewhere. But that was awhile ago, I haven't seen any kind of that talk. I think especially since the accident, they've been focused on just doing these suborbital up and down trips and trying to make them a regular commercial activity.

Anecdotally, people in the space industry don't seem too thrilled with VG. This type of ship was great for the X prize, but it remains to be seen how robust it is. Some of the test flight footage has looked almost unstable. Also their hybrid motor approach (solid & liquid fuel) was said to have gotten all the drawbacks of both approaches with little benefit.

Thanks for the reply, that was my rough impression from eyeballing it but the article certainly talks quite optimistically and I'm not at all an expert.

>The biggest change I saw was they floated the possibility of actually traveling this way- e.g. London to New Mexico or somewhere

Yeah, that definitely seems like a wild thing thrown out, particularly given research like the X-59 QueSST NASA is doing [1]. I can't see them possibly competing successfully with an air breathing supersonic aircraft capable of legal overland flight in terrestrial transport, so there's a squeeze from the bottom. And even from a joyride and "I've gone to space!" angle it doesn't feel that compelling vs actually going into orbit for a similar price (or less!). So it seems like a dead end, albeit a cool one, but also a significant amount of money just for that given the context of the times.

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1: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/lowboom/index.html

Free fall. Like inside an elevator with a broken cable. Here the aeroplane starts the free fall with considerable upwards speed. That and the horisontal speed form an upward parabola path of free fall.

“Can anyone explain what if anything about VG's CURENT R&D would actually carry over to a real spacecraft,”

Why do you limit it to current R&D?

Build profitable “space” business. Make it cheaper, scale it up, reinvest to grow company, more R&D, ... trips into orbit, around moon...

Maybe VG never does but venture capitalists see a market and invest in more space ventures.

Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic sparked the next generation of flight.

>Why do you limit it to current R&D?

Because if all their current R&D is 100% worthless towards their future business (if any) then they aren't actually building any engineering fundamentals right now and might as well be starting from scratch when they need to pivot. It takes many, many years to build up to orbital flight, and everyone starts building that experience and capability at a smaller level. So it's very important if that "smaller level" actually is building towards the next step. Blue Origin for example has been doing a lot of suborbital work with New Shepard, but that is clearly directly building towards full orbital+reusable, they've been building their capabilities wrt vertical landing, scalable engine work, etc.

But if VG's hybrid engine and entire carry/plane concept is simply a fundamental dead end (because it will never have an acceptable mass fraction or hit orbital delta-v reqs or be able to handle orbital reentry say) then most/all of their current R&D is effectively being flushed down the drain. It's not building towards anything new. And that's ignoring whether it could possibly be competitive against what the others are doing.

>Build profitable “space” business.

But what business? Sounding rockets don't match this at all, point-to-point transport doesn't look like a real case for it either, and it also can't do space tourism, just joyrides. But it doesn't look like it'll even be able to do joyrides very well compared to competitors, nor more cheaply.

>scale it up

Some things don't scale up, particularly in rocketry. There is no escaping the rocket equation.

>trips into orbit, around moon

The problem is that from the looks of it not only is nothing they're doing capable of that, it will never be capable of that. I've done some more reading since my post and the hybrid engine concept really just looks like a dud. Their whole plane thing represents a huge amount of wasted mass and extra complexity too.

And again: there is competition here now. If this was all in the 80s/90s yeah it'd be more interesting, even if everyone concluded they'd need to start over from scratch to make a real orbital rocket perhaps there really would be a decade of joyride potential or odd niche uses or something to experiment with. But not against the likes of SpaceX or Blue Origin.

There's no clear path from their current style of rocket to "trips into orbit, around moon". It's dead-end tech - VG going orbital would require either a totally new vehicle (for which little of the current one's work applies) or buying rides with something like SpaceX.

Correct. I never said there was a direct path. I said there might be a profitable path.

There wasn't a direct path from search to self-driving cars, for example. Google makes its money with search ads then reinvests.

> There wasn't a direct path from search to self-driving cars, for example.

Google went in the self-driving car direction only after a) search became wildly profitable and b) search expanded to things like mapping, street view, and heavy investment in AI.

VG isn't in a similar situation - there's little reason to believe suborbital rides for tourists is going to be raking in billions of dollars of cash.

Here I dug this up from 2006.

https://www.space.com/3097-virgin-galactic-anatomy-business-...

There’s probably more. I’ll leave the rest as an exercise for you.

I’m not sure why you can’t use your own imagination. I can easily see this being a catalyst for many other businesses.

That article proves my point pretty well - they were talking about commercial operations starting in 2009. It's almost 2019 now, and they haven't had a single commercial flight.

That’s because someone got killed in the test flight 4 years ago.

Manned space flight is dangerous and progress is slow. I explained this 4 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540723

> That’s because someone got killed in the test flight 4 years ago.

At which point they were already five years behind schedule.

> Manned space flight is dangerous and progress is slow.

Yes, which is further evidence for my "maybe suborbital tourism won't be super profitable" argument.

>suborbital tourism

Is this actually even a real possible thing? "Tourism" is actually pretty well defined since governments and industry take great interest in it, and generally that definition is something along the lines of:

>"The activities of people traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for more then one day and less then one consecutive year for leisure with no compensation from the destination."

That effectively matches common sense: someone is not a tourist if they're just going somewhere local, nor a tourist of City X if they're connecting through a City X airport and have a few hours layover there, and if they flat out move somewhere for a year+ (or even a few continuous months in many jurisdictions) then they're into "resident" territory which has different implications as well.

I don't think spending a few minutes somewhere is tourism, it's at most a joyride from the actual place that person is staying. I guess a suborbital near-space habitat might in principle be possible, but I don't think those could ever reach space? I think the highest high-altitude balloon ever remains BU60-1, which got to 50-someodd km. Which is impressive but far below 100km. Humans have reached 40+km with a balloon, so real mass is possible to lift but I haven't crunched the math on how ginormous a balloon would be needed to support multiple people for any significant time period. And would a rocket plane actually be worth using for a rendezvous there anyway?

All of which is kind of fun and cool to think about, but also to say that it's hard to see a case for this.

"Space tourism" is the general term for these things.

We have no idea. They were shooting for 50,000 tourists in 10 years. They have other business ideas.

My point is that people are dismissing the entire VG project, while I see it as forward progress, which could easily be a catalyst for many other possibilities.