(ZDNet Blogs | Between the Lines) - Virgin Galactic on Wednesday unveiled designs for SpaceShipTwo and the WhiteKnightTwo, two vehicles that are designed to usher in private spaceflight. The technology behind the system will have an open architecture “like Linux,” said officials.
In an event at the American Museum at Natural History in New York (see gallery), Virgin Galactic unveiled the first product of venture to manufacture a reusable spacecraft and its launch craft. In July 2005, Burt Rutan, President of Scaled Composites and Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group of companies, formed a company to manufacture and design SpaceShipTwo, a suborbital craft, and WhiteKnightTwo, a launch system.
“Our vision of White Knight 2 would be part of a much longer development program. Have open architecture like Linux to allow other people to develop new vehicles and revolutionize new industrial uses of space,” said Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, Virgin’s spaceline.
Whitehorn clarified the open architecture point a bit: He said that if interested parties come to Virgin and Scaled Composites they can use key points such as WhiteKnightTwo’s wing to build new aircraft. “We will work with people that come to work with us to do new things with the WhiteKnightTwo. If people come to us we’ll work with them.”
Whitehorn added that interested parties are already in discussions about building off of the properties of WhiteKnightTwo, but wasn’t going to name names. Overall, Virgin Galactic wasn’t detailing technical details behind the spaceship effort.