SS2 Carrier Aircraft Lifts Off On One-Hour Shakeout

It's official: "Eve" has wings. Scaled Composites' WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft ascended into the skies over the Mojave Air and Space Port (MHV) Sunday morning, for an hour-long test flight that marked the most public milestone to date for the company's plans to implement commercial space travel.

Industry sources report WK2 lifted off at approximately 0815 PST Sunday morning, and touched down 60 minutes later to the appreciation of Scaled employees, Mojave residents and curious onlookers who trekked out to the desolate airfield in the wee hours of a Sunday morning to witness the event.

Scaled will conduct a series of unladen test flights with WK2 until the first SpaceShipTwo spacecraft is ready for unpowered flight trials, expected sometime in early 2009. Scaled and client Virgin Galactic hope to begin commercial spaceflights before the end of 2010.

Unveiled in January and originally expected to fly this summer, WhiteKnightTwo is the world's largest, all-carbon composite flying aircraft. Sporting unique high altitude lift capacity, WhiteKnightTwo -- dubbed "Eve" by Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson, in honor of his mother -- will be the mothership for the SpaceShipTwo, carrying the rocket-propelled suborbital spacecraft and its eight passengers aloft to launch altitudes.

Powered by four Pratt & Whitney PW308A turbofans, the WK2 mothership has also been designed to be capable of lifting other payloads and launching them into space. Both Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic believe the system has sufficient lifting capability to launch unmanned vehicles designed to carry small satellites and other scientific payload into low earth orbit.

Peter Diamandis, whose X-Prize revolution sparked the fever that created SpaceShipOne and led to the develop of this airframe as the launch platform for SpaceShipTwo, was very pleased with the news.

"Congrats on the first step to future revenue flights for a whole new industry," Diamandis told Aero-News. "It was December 17th, 2003, when history was made with the first powered flight of SpaceShipOne and less than a year later, they won the Ansari X-Prize. I look forward to seeing SpaceShipTwo take to the stratosphere in 2009."

FMI: www.scaled.com, www.virgingalactic.com