Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Inside Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo

Episode Date: November 8, 2016

Host Mat Kaplan traveled to California’s Mojave Desert for a tour of Virgin Galactic’s The Spaceship Company, where the second SpaceShipTwo was built and is undergoing flight tests. TSC Executive VP Enrico Palermo was his guide.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Inside Virgin Galactic Spaceship 2, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Let's head for California's Mojave Desert and the busy hangar where Virgin Spaceship Unity is getting ready to rocket into space. Bill Nye is marking his significant achievement in efforts to protect humanity from space-borne Armageddon. On our weekly What's Up segment,

Bruce Betts will mark what would have been Carl Sagan's 82nd birthday. Just before we present another space trivia contest, we begin as we should by visiting with the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, we're a bit late getting to it, but still plenty to look forward to in this month. In your What's Up in the Solar System for November of 2016, let's start with Cassini, which you say is having a big, big month. It really is. Cassini is now circling Saturn. To me, it feels a bit like circling the drain, but we're not quite there yet.

But it is going around really fast, like once every eight or nine days. It's fast for Cassini because that means it's quite close to Saturn. And the reason they've got so close is because they are just about, at the end of the month, to do this major Titan flyby that will abruptly shift its periapsis, the closest point to Saturn on its orbit, way closer to Saturn than it's been before. Right now, the periapsis is close to Titan. They're going to jump over all the rings, the E and G rings, to right outside the F ring, which is right outside the main ring system. So they're going to be going in between the G and F rings for 20 orbits. It's going to be fabulous close-up views of Saturn's rings and a whole new phase of the mission. Very exciting stuff. How about jumping one planet inward to Juno circling Jupiter?

Yeah, so the news from Juno is not quite as good. They had to skip their orbit burn to shorten their orbit to two weeks, and they also didn't get to do science in the last periapsis. And it now sounds like they're going to stay in this long 53 and a half day orbit for quite some time while they try to figure out what's going on with their thruster system. Now, Juno can still keep doing science on each periapsis. It's just that the science is going to happen a lot slower. To me, the most unfortunate thing about it is that with Cassini going into this special orbit that's very close to the planet, Cassini's orbit and Juno's orbit were going to look very much the

same at the same time. And they were going to be able to do the same kind of science at two giant planets with the same sun having the same activity at the same time. And the longer that Juno stays in this really long orbit, the less overlap the two great missions get studying the giant planets in the same way. So that's a little bit sad. That's a shame, yeah, but still both doing good science. In the time we have left, you've got so many other items here. In this November 1st review of what's coming up this month, or in some cases what's already happened, there's ExoMars, the trace gas orbiter.

Yes, they're going to get two precious science orbits turning on all their instruments and studying Mars the way they want to before they have to shut them all off to spend about a year aerobraking into their final circular Mars orbit. But they'll get a nice taste of science on two orbits this month, including some Phobos imaging, which I'm looking forward to. And finally, from our colleague Jason Davis, the Long March 5, a big rocket, made it out of China. Yes, and that is a really big deal. That rocket is as powerful as a Delta IV Heavy. It will be able to get China to its lunar sample return plans and eventually to launch big components for space stations. So that's an important milestone for the Chinese space program. And should anybody be curious about where everything is in the solar system,

you've once again included that updated map from Olaf Froon, is it? It's close enough. All right. Anyway, it is in the November 1st update from Emily. And there's another post just about Juno that has an update to that marble movie as the spacecraft approached the king of planets in our solar system. Thank you, Emily. Thank you, Matt. She is our senior editor and planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society,

also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. The boss, the CEO of the Planetary Society is Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, we note this week that NASA announces that it has reached a milestone of sorts, a kilometer marker. We love kilometer markers, but in this case, we need 15,000 of them. We believe we found the 15,000th asteroid that's near the Earth. This is the kind of thing that is important because of what we discovered about the ancient dinosaurs. You do not want to get hit by an asteroid, even a small one. It certainly indicates a lot of progress. And this includes even fairly small asteroids, ones that might not even make it down to the surface, plus those planet-killing ones.

Yeah, well, I like to think of them as city-killing, county-killing, country-killing, continent-killing, and then everything that you've ever known killing asteroids. So they're important to find, as I like to joke, as we like to joke, there is no evidence that the ancient dinosaurs had a space program. And so if they did, they were unsuccessful. But we could be the first generation of people that is ready to deflect one of these things. And the key is to find it early. And by early, they mean 20 years, 20 years before it would not only cross the Earth's orbit,

but hit the Earth. So it's a very important work. It's not something you stop doing everything else and address. It's something that you as a civilization just constantly work on, constantly keep it going, counting asteroids, determining their orbital paths, and kind of getting ready with a big rocket to go out there, give it a nudge, give it a little nudge. Clearly FEMA and NASA are taking this seriously because they're practicing for the worst. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're really revving it up to be ready to evacuate people from a small, let's call it a city-sized, what did you call it? A city killer asteroid. Yeah. That would be really good to be ready for something like that. Even better, it'd be ready to deflect it, give it a nudge. Well, we need that 20-year warning that you were talking about. Yeah, that's right. And we can do it, though. Finding the 15,000th one is significant. It means the effort's going along. It's something that we should all be proud of. It's a good use of our intellect and treasure.

And something that is central to the Planetary Society mission. Ah, yes, it is indeed. Thank you, Matt. You're welcome. Thank you, Bill. Let's change the worlds. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill Nye the science guy, that is. On now to

the Mojave Desert and me getting to stick my head inside Spaceship Two. Yeah, it was thrilling. Wow, really? Yep. The Mojave Desert is where scores of experimental aircraft have taken flight, a few spacecraft too, including the Space Shuttle.

Out on a corner of the Mojave Air and Spaceport is a nearly new hangar that belongs to the Spaceship Company, the now wholly owned division of Virgin Galactic, charged with building and testing the White Knight II motherships that will take Spaceship II rocket planes to their launch altitude of about 15,000 meters or 50,000 feet. From there, Spaceship Two will carry its pilots and astronaut clients beyond the edge of space. I parked in front of the huge and poetically named facility in early October. I am in the reception area of Faith that belongs to the Spaceship Company with one of the guys in charge here, Enrico Palermo, who is the Executive VP and General Manager.

Did I get that right? Yeah, welcome Matt, welcome to F.A.I.T.H. So F.A.I.T.H. is really our home for the spaceship company operations here in Mojave. It stands for Final Assembly Integration and Test Hangar and based on that name you can kind of guess what we're going to see when we head out to the shop floor. And I can't wait. I'm thrilled. It's been a good long while. One of the better acronyms, though, NASA should be taking acronym training from you guys.

Yeah, maybe. We're not great, though. A couple of other buildings are like Building 79, Building 4, so we need to up our game on some of our other buildings. Yeah, but this is where a lot of the magic happens. It is. This is where we rolled out Spaceship early this year and it's where we're conducting flight tests from. Lead on. Yeah. I'll just tag along. So this was a hanger that was you know purpose-built for our program. We sized it for parallel build and assembly of

two of our motherships, the White Knight 2, and up to three of our spaceships. Right now you'll see one White Knight 2 and one spaceship and a lot of other activity reflecting sort of where the program's at. But we're excited that we've actually started the next spaceship but it's in fabrication in another building hasn't come into an assembly phases yet. Oh my god. Yeah we call this the OS corridor you come out and you see both vehicles. So to our right is Virgin Mothership Eve, the launch vehicle, which I think you've seen in the past, Matt. And then Virgin Spaceship Unity.

This is the spaceship that is in flight test now. We started last month. The first vehicle that the spaceship company has built and assembled. I'm waiting for my goosebumps to go down. Yeah, it's pretty neat. Yeah, let's go for a walk and have a look. We have restarted tours for our future astronauts from around the world and so we take Polaroid photos of them and put them on a map of the world and then it's a nice connection reminds our team that

we are building the spaceships for these remarkable individuals about 700 from around the world 58 countries have signed up to fly on Spaceship Two. I've met a lot of these people, and other than being incredibly envious of them, I'm so impressed with their enthusiasm. They can't wait. Yeah, they're really, they are part of our program. They're not just a customer. Many have signed up because they realize what is happening at VG and TSC. And new space generally is this interesting pivot, I think, in humanity's history.

And they really want to be at the start of it. So they've signed their Polaroids here. And I'm just looking at the one from Carl that says, I'm probably going naked. I don't know if that'll be against VG rules. Yeah, that's typical of astronaut Carl. It would be against current rules, but you never know. All right, should we head over this way? So we'll go around the back and then we'll just check in with the crew chiefs because the vehicles are in active sort of flight operations,

various maintenance things. So hoping to get a spaceship in the air for glide flight as soon as we can. So much like the scaled flight test program of the first spaceship too, it's an incremental expansion of the flight envelope. So we start with Captive Cary, which we did in September, moving to a series of glide flights where we incrementally expand the speed subsonic envelope and then press into powered flights. So let me congratulate you on that September 8th very successful captured flight. Yeah, thank you. It was a huge emotional milestone for the team

to get back to flight test. A great thing at the end of many years of work. So, you know, it's taken us a while to build Virgin Spaceship Unity, but at the same time we had to build this company. The spaceship company didn't exist until several years ago. So in parallel to building the first spaceship, we built the company. And so getting to flight was sort of a culmination of many years of hard work from the whole team.

You've got a huge space here, and a lot of it is taken up by what appear to be engineering workstations. Yeah, one of the things we focus on that we think is critical for communication and ultimately safety of the product is having the engineering engineers and the program management on the shop floor with the technicians that are assembling and integrating the vehicles so here we're looking at the team that is responsible for essentially verification substantiation of the design preparation flight test modifications eventually it'll start to shrink as we move a lot of this team to the next two spaceships but this is also the you know flight test team so many of these individuals sit in mission control during flight test. How many people do you have out here in the Mojave right now? So the spaceship company is roughly 350 employees as a sort of the manufacturing part of Virgin

Galactic and then Virgin Galactic operations which is ultimately the team that will mostly transplant to New Mexico at Spaceport America, is about 90. So about 450 here in Mojave campus. So we're now probably the second largest employer in the airport after scale composites. It's a very new kind of division for Virgin. It is. You know, I think, you know, manufacturing itself is not something Virgin has done traditionally, but what Virgin has done traditionally is enter markets, establish markets, and sort of look at ways to do business better and do it differently with an objective of really delivering our customer services above and beyond whatever else is in the marketplace. And I think we have an opportunity both on the Launcher 1 program and the Spaceship 2 program to deliver a same kind of approach to customer service and value for the customer.

So we have a pretty cool office at the Planetary Society, a lot of cool space props. We don't have any wing spacecraft. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I actually sit on the shop floor, so the desks we look at, myself and the president, Doug Shane, of the Spaceship Company, we're on the shop floor. And yeah, rather than sit in an office, I pull my head up and there's a spaceship there. So it's pretty neat. And this is the new model.

I mean, we're not talking about the grand old companies of aerospace where, I mean, I've been through it. You have to go through a whole bunch of layers to get up to the people at your level, Doug Shain's level. Yeah, that's right. Very approachable. Doug has a good joke that we abandoned our open-door policy. We got rid of the walls. And it works out well. It means anyone can come to us at any time and chat and vice versa.

So are we going any further than this? Yeah, we're going to go further. Let's go check with the crew chief. Okay. I can follow you in here. Chad, can we go around the front of White Knight 2? Great. Thank you.

Okay. You've seen White Knight 2 before, but we took delivery of Eve, which is the name of this first mothership after Richard's mother, from Scal Composites. We've been operating it for a couple of years now. Really, we just continue to evolve it. This is our first stage that has flown over 210 times in various missions, so we continue to optimize it for commercial service right now

where we're just doing some inspections and preparing it for the next flight. There is a woman up there right above the center of this beautiful aircraft who's got her head halfway down into sort of a cowl there. Yeah that's right that is Courtney. Courtney is one of our AMP mechanics on the Virgin Galactic ops team and yeah we're doing I think three flight inspections that are part of the sort of perennial maintenance plan on the vehicle. You look at an aircraft like this and if you're into aviation at all you think Burt Rutan. What's the relationship now with Scaled Composites? The program is now run by Virgin Galactic and the Spaceship Company so both Spaceship 2 and White Knight 2, the design, the engineering of the base models was developed by Scaled

and so they were under contract with the Spaceship company in fact to deliver these vehicles. And then now we're essentially have got to the phase, the planned phase of transitioning all the intellectual property and know-how for designing and building and testing these vehicles and we essentially do that all in-house. And that's one of the primary reasons we're in Mojave is we have to facilitate that knowledge transfer as well as you know Mojave's and the whole Antelope Valley is sort of a proven crucible for sort of aerospace divine development. I'll say yeah all the interesting neighbors you have here. Yes we do yeah. All right let's go look at Unity. So Unity is our is our pride and joy so we unveiled her to the world in February this year. It was in this hangar, so if you've seen footage from that,

you wouldn't believe it. Yeah, I was fortunate enough to be towing the Land Rover with Richard next to me sort of waving to the crowd. So that was a real buzz. The vehicle's in essentially modification for the next flight, so the next flight is intended to be a glide flight. You can see the vehicle. It actually came on a good day matt i'm sorry let me stop you like you're going to release unity next time yep that's the plan so unless you know the the first captive carry flight

was very successful it was a long flight three hours 45 and so we had a very uh detailed test card um but you know we haven't gone through final flight readiness reviews that's that's the plan uh for the next flight but you've arrived on a unique day, the vehicle's feathered, so you can actually see what the vehicle looks like in its feathered configuration for re-entry. And so this is a remarkable vehicle that flies at two to three times the speed of sound, but also has to fold in half as part of its re-entry into the atmosphere. And I remember hearing Bert Rutan talk about how this came to him. He, like, sat up in bed one night and realized,

hey, this is a way to get stuff back from space without overcomplicating things. Could you just describe, I mean, most of our audience probably knows what we're looking at right now, but just in case. Yeah, it was certainly sort of a eureka moment. So traditionally there's been two ways to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and re-entry is typically one of the riskier parts of a, it's either that or launch of some of the riskiest parts of a mission and BIRD had actually lost a friend on the X-15 which you know, until we wanted to develop a spaceship really had to

solve how we're going to solve this problem of re-entry and traditionally there's been two main forms of re-entry. One is a capsule type re-entry, very stable configuration, very predictable, still employed today and it's a very successful model. The difficulty is you've got to land with parachutes and you generally don't land back where you took off from, you land in the desert or somewhere remote and you need systems to augment the landing. The alternative is a space plane like the the Space Shuttle or the X-15.

The beauty of those is you have wings, so you can navigate in the airfield and you can navigate to a runway, which for us, for the versatility of wings, is required for sort of a high-flight operation, and I think ultimately ties us into methods for sort of point-to-point travel. And so wings are very important to us, but wings, traditionally, for reentry, you have to very accurately control the attitude of the vehicle, otherwise you risk burning up in reentry.

And so what the Feather system does is take the stable, high-drag characteristics of a capsule reentry and sort of merges it with the versatility of a wing spacecraft. And so sort of the best of both worlds is sort of the architecture. That's the phrase I was thinking of. There's so much more going on here. I mean, it's buzzing with activity, but there's so much technology in this.

I remember when I was last out here with the boss, Bill Nye, and a bunch of other people, there were things we couldn't look at, or at least we weren't supposed to photograph, because they were composite materials. And there's a lot of high-tech material science in this isn't there there is so both the mothership and the spaceship are

100 carbon fiber structure there's some other metals here and there but uh generally even the airframe the airframe the airframe is is all composite and in many world many respects we're leading the world in terms of taking aircraft this large, you know, White Knight Tours 140-foot wingspan, into commercial service or all-carbon fiber. And so, you know, we can leverage, obviously, the great talent that was developed at Scal Composites over the year and continually refine it in the spaceships we're building here at the Spaceship Company. There is a tank right in front of us here. Obviously, the leading edge of this wing has been removed.

What are we looking at? In fact, looking at two tanks, there's a protective cover on them just to protect them while the leading edge is off. These are the pneumatic tanks. So a spaceship in many ways is pneumatically powered for many of its systems. One of the core functions, obviously, is an environmental control system, both the primary and a backup emergency environmental control system. The feather is pneumatically controlled so we get air pressure from the pneumatics and also the reaction control system and a

few other things use than the potential energy stored in those bottles. You mentioned the X-15. You've got a reaction control system because, and so does Space Shuttle, because you're going to be in space. You can't use tails and ailerons. Yeah, that's right. Once we're out of the atmosphere, the control surfaces don't have any value because there's no air pressure for them to react against. So we can go a bit closer.

They're covered up for FOD protection, but this is where the... Oh yeah. You can see a couple of the nozzles on the wingtips and so these here are to control roll of the vehicle so if you shoot these ones up you're going to roll to the left for example and then on the nose you can see where we control. Can I just say again, so cool. Yeah it is neat so again you can see the nozzles here they're on top as well so that allows us to control pitch and yaw of the vehicle.

Yeah very much as you see the little openings all over the space shuttle. That's right. That's right. Again, one of the beauties of the architecture is we don't have another gas system to control for our reaction control system. We're using the same compressed air to run the reaction control system. That's Enrico Palermo of the Spaceship Company. We'll continue our tour of the Virgin Galactic Division in a minute when we'll stick our heads inside Virgin Spaceship Company will continue our tour of the Virgin Galactic Division in a minute when we'll stick our heads inside Virgin Spaceship Unity. Great photos are on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio.

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But Kate, are you a science teacher? No. Are you? Nope. We're going to need help. We want to involve teachers and education experts from the beginning to make sure that what we produce is useful in your classroom. As a first step, we're building the STEAM team. That's science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. So teachers, to learn more about how you can help guide this effort,

check out planetary.org slash STEAM team. That's planetary.org slash STEAM team. And help us spread the word. Thanks. STEAM Team. That's planetary.org slash STEAM Team. And help us spread the word. Thanks. Bye. Bye. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

We're in the Mojave Desert inside a gigantic hangar called Faith. It belongs to the Spaceship Company, a division of Virgin Galactic that was founded by Bert Rutan of Scaled Composites and the leader of the Virgin Group, Richard Branson. It now belongs entirely to Virgin Galactic, which is making history by building Spaceship Two there. Enrico Palermo is TSC's executive vice president and general manager. We had moved just before the break from Eve, the White Knight Two mothership, to VSS Unity, the second Spaceship II. Okay, here's the big question of the day. There's an open hatch there. Can I stick my head through there?

Let me check first. Go ahead. Okay, here goes. Don't mind me. We're looking inside VSS Unity now now and there is the functioning instrument panel, all glass of course as they say, all digital instrumentation, with three big screens and a whole bunch of other stuff that my pilot brother and others I'm sure would recognize. Is that instrument panel, does it have a lot in common with what you'd find in an airplane like white knight 2? Yeah actually white knight 2 is the exact same instrument panels they were developed for the whole system and that's one of

the beauties of white knight 2 is in many respects it was the it is the airborne it is the wind tunnel it is the engineering test bed for spaceships so where it makes sense you're going to find commonality between systems of the mothership and the spaceship so clearly there's manufacturing benefits from that but there's also training benefits and qualification benefits. So the flight displays you see here are custom for our vehicle but in terms of you know your typical many of the features that you'd expect on a typical MFD, multifunction display, however we have things such as energy management embedded into ours for

the glide and re-entry of spaceships. So the actual symbology and what the pilot sees is customised to the flight profile. People often notice why isn't there a wheel at the front of a spaceship? There's a skid. There's a skid, yeah. So skids have been, we're not the first certainly to use a skid but the reason... X-15 once again. X-15, yeah. I mean the reality is a spaceship doesn't have to take off.

It is launched, it doesn't have to take off. It is launched. It doesn't have to taxi and take off on a runway like a normal aircraft. And so the only thing it has to do on the runway is land. And so the skid has several benefits. One, we get a lot of brake energy out of abrading that skid as we go down the runway. Two, if you look at how you could package this, it really packages into a long strip that's only a few inches wide. So very high, good packing density.

We also don't have another pressure vessel in a tyre at the front of the vehicle, which is another risk. And we can steer on the ground with differential braking and all things during landing. So it's simple, it's lightweight, packages well, doesn't have a tyre at the front of the vehicle. How about the business end at the back, the rocket engine? Yeah, you won't see it in a moment because we're starting with the captive carrying and glide flight test program but the vehicle is powered by what we call a hybrid rocket motor and a hybrid really is a

we use a liquid oxidizer in nitrous oxide and a solid fuel and essentially in a cartridge it's a rubber based fuel and the beauty of the hybrid is it's very simple architecture. The only moving piece in our whole rocket propulsion system is the valve, the main valve. And it's either opened or closed. We don't throttle during flight. From a system safety design perspective, it's very simple to design that architecture. From an abort perspective, all we have to do is close that valve and we can glide to a landing at any point in the rocket profile. It's not like with a vertical launcher, you've got to ride that rocket for a certain amount of time or you've got to blast off and escape an event.

We just have to shut our motor down and the vehicle can glide back to Earth. So in a way, again, the best of both worlds, the best of both liquid and solid rocket technology. You mentioned that rubber-like propellant. That's kind of a circling back, isn't it? Didn't you, you started with that, left it, now we're back to that. Yeah, I mean, architecture-wise, we've, the architecture is the same, just the different fuel will give you different performance parameters. The first three powered flights of Spaceship Two did use a rubber-based fuel, and then the fourth flight of Spaceship Two was using a different fuel formulation. Parallel to that, the spaceship company had started bringing that in-house as well because ultimately that was the plan for all that to come over to TSC. And so we didn't change

the motor for any particular reason. There were sort of two development paths, but we felt that the rubber path was probably the longer-term thing which should suit us for commercial service. So right now, as you said, just a big opening there. There's no rocket engine. Yeah, and the tail cone is missing as well. So we've got the tail cone currently off. But there's going to be, hopefully before too long, another rocket engine on there. If everything goes well, how far off do you think we are from a return to powered flight? Yeah, you know, we're keeping our cards pretty close to our chest there, Matt, on that. And that's because, you know, ultimately we're driven by safety. We want to

be careful of putting our data out there and then being measured against it and maybe not making the right decisions programmatically. So, you know, we want to get there certainly as quickly as we can, but the priority is to get there safely. We have the advantage that we can leverage a lot of the flight test data from the scale program and all the expertise there to maybe accelerate our flight test program. But, you know, this is a new vehicle and is a flight test development vehicle as well. Beautiful paid job. Yeah, we did an awesome job. So the silver you see on the inside of the booms, we put that there for technical reasons.

And we liked it so much that we sort of wrapped it around the other side because it looks neat. It is cool. Yeah. We're just off the shop floor now. There's a little conference room. I bet this is kept really busy. Yeah, I'm surprised we got it, actually. It's a busy time.

I said we're actively in flight test. We're preparing the operations to commercial service, and we are starting the next spaceship as well. I was out at what was then still Rockwell, not too long after we lost the Challenger space shuttle. And I was talking with the guy who was in charge of fixing things, making things right. And what became very clear is that the space shuttle built after that time was a different vehicle. I mean, it looked the same, but there was an opportunity to do so many things that, you know,

tragically the accident kind of forced them to do, but they went even beyond that. Is any of that true with VSS Unity? What I'd say is fundamentally the concept of operations, the outer mold line, the base design hasn't changed significantly. What's changed in light of the accident? Well, two things have changed. Changes in light of the accident and sort of separate to that, changes in light of us having the chance to build another one. Clearly, we've made improvements to the controls with respect to the feather, making sure the thing that happened on PFF4 won't happen again. So we have a mechanical inhibit in place in respect to that. I think we've talked about that publicly to date but we did really take a step back and look at the human interface in

general and where are there other opportunities or risks that we need to protect against. I think overall we have a much more robust design as a result of the accident so it wasn't just we tackled the issue that happened in PFF4 it just made us make sure it was you know we looked under every stone and saw if there's anything else we need to go address. The other changes we see in Unity more come from the fact that we have the benefit that we're building the vehicle the second time. So we can take all the lessons learned from the build of Enterprise into the build. We did take into the build of Unity. So where we've seen opportunities to maybe optimize structure or get things in the final place the first time, we've done that.

So externally to the vehicle, you're not going to see that. It's really in the innards. But fundamentally, the base design hasn't changed and the concept of operations hasn't changed. The only thing you'll see externally is we have bigger horizontal stabilizers on the vehicle. They're about 10% bigger by area. And that's just to give us a little more alpha envelope for commercial service. But basically, the concept, what we see out there, this aircraft, excuse me, spacecraft, it's a concept, it's a design that you guys, Virgin Galactic,

stand by and feel this is going to be the successful way for us to get a whole lot of people into space? We did. And, you know, certainly Richard and the board had to, you know, review that decision after the accident. It was an unfortunate day, clearly, and a tragic day. But we were fortunate that there was a lot of telemetry from the flight. So we very quickly could ascertain the likely what happened in that flight. And I think the speed of the NTSB investigation also showed that when you have that amount of data, it's easy to draw conclusions that enable us to think, you know, fundamentally, we believe in the concept operations and the design of the vehicle, but there's areas we need to improve. And we've gone and tackled those.

And apparently, from what I've heard George Whiteside say, CEO of Virgin Galactic, the vast majority of the people who've paid you money for a ride on that spaceship out there, they're very happy with this. They still are raring to go. Yeah, they are. People may think that we lost a lot of customers after the accident. We didn't. And I think that was a reflection that people know this is a flight test development program.

However tragic the event was, they still saw that, you know, where we were going was the right model. And, you know, we've got an amazing bunch of future astronauts around the world. I'm one of the lucky ones that host them when they're in Mojave on these monthly tours. And certainly, you know, you get constant feedback of, look, keep going. And, you know, some of them don't mind. You know, they want to make sure it's safe before they fly. So they're like, get it right before you put me on the spaceship. Of course yeah that's certainly what I would be saying. Talk about the experience they're going to have this is something we've

talked with George about in the past but it's worth repeating. Yeah I mean the experience goes well beyond just a space flight it really starts the the moment you sign up for a flight with with Virgin Galactic but sort of of core to the flight experience, you'll be in New Mexico for three to four days. And New Mexico is where Spaceport America is located. It'll be our initial operating headquarters. And during those three to four days, you're really going to be focused on the training and preparation for flight.

You're not just a passenger on the vehicle. You're part of the crew. Choreographing and planning with your crew members how you're going to execute your mission to space is critical. Obviously, there'll be safety training, fitting out your flight suit, probably some hygiene exposure, things like that, in those days leading up to final medical checks. And then you will take your flight to space.

Hygiene? You're going to have a centrifuge there? Work in progress. I don't think we'll have... I'm getting outside my area of influence here. I really work on the manufacturing side. I don't want to get you in progress. I don't think we'll have, you know, I'm getting outside my area of influence here. I really work on the manufacturing. I don't want to get you in trouble. Yeah, so, I mean, there will be some way to give some people exposure to high G. And it's not that the G on the vehicle is that high that it's not sustainable.

Just so we really want our future astronauts, our astronauts when they fly, to know what's coming so they can really maximize the experience of their flight. How much time in microgravity? So it's three to four minutes of microgravity. And so microgravity starts basically at the end of rocket motor cutout until you start re-entering the atmosphere. It's sort of the top of the, I guess, it's not really the top of the arc into space. They'll be able to release their seatbelts and float around a little bit before they have to jump back into their seats?

Yeah, that's the plan. It certainly will be the option. We're not going to force people that they have to get out of their seat, but I don't think there'll be many that don't. You couldn't keep me in it. Me either. No, that is the intent. And in many respects, why we scaled up from a spaceship one to spaceship two,

Richard and the leaders of Galactica at the time felt it was essential to the product that the individuals could get out of their seat and experience microgravity. Here's another related question. Other than going up on the greatest joyride in the history of humanity, I know there's been a lot of talk,

I think I've heard George Whitesides talk about this, that some of the future of this may be in point-to-point travel. Virgin is obviously best known as an airline. Yeah, certainly Richard has expressed an aspiration for point-to-point travel somewhere in our development path. I mean, that is an incredibly difficult technical challenge to solve, but I think in many respects what we're doing with Spaceship Two are stepping stones, right? We're learning fly the average the average populace at high g into space uh we are learning how to integrate these vehicles into the national airspace uh we're working through the regulatory things to make this happen so i think all of those are

stepping stones to a point to point but certainly there's there's advances still required in in propulsion and thermal protection and structures to get there but i you know i don't think it's impossible but it's not it's not a tomorrow thing either. But it's certainly something Richard has aspired and inspired us to look towards. I've never talked to anybody in this business, including the government side of it, who wouldn't agree with the fact that this is a long, hard road. Space is hard. Steady progress, and you're pleased with the progress? This program has taken a good number of years and I think that yeah it is it is hard. I've been in the program for several years now

and I know we've got an incredible team that's working really hard and are fully motivated towards the vision. We're doing this not for just test pilots we're doing it for flights for you and me and ultimately our children so I think I think it's prudent that we take the time to get it right. You have been here a few years. I read that you were the first employee of the Spaceship Company. Yeah, so I joined the Virgin Galactic Program almost 10 years ago back in London. Really, my early focus was supporting the development program at Scal Composites and then working on the business plan for the Spaceship Company. So my wife Nadia and I moved to the desert in November 2008. That was really to kick off, you know, be the client and kick off the flight test program at scale

with, you know, White Knight 2 flew a month later and then start building out the spaceship company. Our many enthusiastic listeners in Australia, I'm sure, are loving your accent. You were from Perth? I'm from Perth, Australia. Correct. So here via London, the Mojave is not London. No, you could say it was, you know, culture shock. It wasn't, it wasn't. I'd been visiting Mojave for a couple of years and knew where I was moving to. So fully vested in that move and no regrets. And, you know, the Mojave Desert is a remarkable place.

You can, you know, like I say to new employees that join us, you can either look at it as the middle of nowhere or the middle of everywhere. And if you choose the latter, you'll have a great time and leverage your beautiful assets out here in terms of national parks and things like that. And sort of know that you're part of this heritage that has gone for many years now in the desert

in developing cool and innovative aerospace vehicles. I don't have to be convinced I've had the best time every time I've come out here. You obviously, this is something you wanted to do with your life. It is lifelong passion for space, human space flight. So it was one of the reasons, well, actually the reason we left Australia was to look at opportunities to get involved in sort of the commercial space industry that was starting up at the time. And Virgin seems to be a special sort of place to do anything, you know, whether you're making records or cola or building spaceships. Yeah, it is. You know, Richard and the leadership team in Corporative have, I think, done a great job defining our brand values and approach to business. And it's exciting to apply that in aerospace. Enrico, really all I can do now is say that I sure look forward to coming back.

And knowing that free flights, VSS Unity flying on its own, may not be too far off if things go well. I sure hope I can see you again soon. Yeah, we'd love to have you out here. You know, we don't publicize our flight test dates because they're flight tests, but, you know, we'll hopefully be in the air soon. Thank you so much. I've had a blast. Have to make the long trip back into the city now,

but I'm going to miss being in the Mojave in spite of the 80-mile-an-hour winds last night. Yeah, safe travels. We've actually had a great summer here in the desert, and overnight it's got windy. But anyway, that's why those windmills are here. But anyway, safe travels, and glad I could show you around. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. The Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society joins us once again. That's Bruce Betts. Welcome back.

Hey, thanks. Good to be back. Hey, I saw, with your warning, Venus and the Moon very close to each other last week, and I wasn't frightened because you'd prepared me. Kind of viewed it as just a pretty thing. But yeah, I guess it could be terrifying, so I'm glad you were prepared. You never know what the skies have in store for us. But you're going to tell us again. Actually, we usually do. I mean, there are things like meteors that we don't but we're

working on it we're working on it uh yeah in the night sky as matt said venus is the super bright object darlach object over in the west soon after sunset there are other planets lined up with it but they're tougher to see if you go to venus's lower, there is Saturn, which is quite low to the horizon. And Venus's far to its upper left is reddish Mars. In the pre-dawn sky, we've got super bright Jupiter low in the east before dawn. Those are the easy things to check out. Apparently, it's not easy to speak, but it's easy to see. We move on to this week in space history.

1934, Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan was born. Oh, that's great. And 1971, Mariner 9 became the first Mars orbiter. And we started to learn that Mars wasn't quite such a nasty place after all, right? We did. At least it had all sorts of interesting geology that we didn't know from the first flyby missions. But first, we had to wait for a global dust storm to calm down. Those are spectacular. Alright, we're ready to go on.

Random Space Fact! The first recorded supernova likely was recorded almost 2,000 years ago. SN 185 was recorded in 185 AD by Chinese astronomers who said a strange star appeared in what we now call the constellation Centaurus and was visible for about eight months. Supernovas, the end state of massive stars, can outshine an entire galaxy at their peak brightness. state of massive stars can outshine an entire galaxy at their peak brightness. So I take it that we can still see something there? Is there like, you know, a cloud of gas there now or something?

They think they've found a remnant of it, yes. So they think so. It's a little dicier from the descriptions that long ago. But yes, it's not as obvious as the Crab Nebula from SN 1054. We're ready to go on. We were thinking New Horizons. I asked you what science instruments on the New Horizons spacecraft have the names of characters from the TV show The Honeymooners. How'd we do, Matt?

We did well. Well, let me let the central character in that old classic television show provide part of the answer. That was Ralph Cramden. And just for those of you who aren't aware, he never did hit Alice. In fact, Alice was the far superior character. She was much smarter than either Ralph or his crony Norton, and usually had the upper hand. Just had to put up with this guy. But he clearly was interested in astronomy

and space exploration. Yeah, clearly, yes. So yes, the instruments, Alice and Ralph. It was Scott Schlieper who got chosen by Random.org this time around. Scott won almost to the day two years ago. It was the last time he won the contest.

He did say Ralph and Alice, named for the Cramdons on the 1950s television series The Honeymooners. Came back in the 60s. There was a remake, I think, in the early 2000s. Of course, The Flintstones. Largely, largely based. You know, we should make a remake. I call Ralph. Oh, no problem. I would, we should make a remake. I call Ralph.

Oh, no problem. I would absolutely want to be Norton. Hey, Ralphie. Ralphie, baby. You didn't want to shake hands with Norton. I won't explain why. We got other great entries. Hudson Ansley said,

bang zoom to the moon, Alice, which was the famous Ralph Cramden quote. He points out, though, that, of course, in this case, the moon would be Sharon. John Harrison, he never thought my dad making me watch Honeymooners reruns would come in handy someday. From Setapong in Jamaica, New York, this is the longest Honeymooner episode ever. And finally, this from Dustin Berg in Richlands, North Dakota. The distance from HN Pegasi to our solar system is about 60 years, meaning the potential residents of any Earth-like planets or otherwise in that system

could be enjoying the Honeymooners right now. Got Sleeper is going to get that prize package of a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account from that worldwide network, non-profit network of telescopes around the world that you can use to point at stuff

like the Crab Nebula or Venus, for that matter, I assume. And we're going to give away that same package again this week to whomever answers this next question from Bruce correctly and gets chosen by random.org. All right, back to supernova. What supernova did famous astronomer Tycho Brahe observe? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 15th. That would be

November 15 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. Good luck, everybody. And good luck to you, Bruce. And good luck to you, Norton. All right, everybody. Go out there. Look up the night sky and

think about why cheese comes in different colors. Thank you, and good night. Green cheese, that's what Alice would have found, of course. That's Bruce Betts. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its courageous members.

Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.