Displaying items by tag: space plane

The SpaceShipTwo (SS2) is a suborbital, air-launched space plane, designed for space tourism. It is under development by The Spaceship Company.

SpaceShipTwo is carried to its launch altitude by a mothership, the Scaled Composites White Knight Two, before being launched to fly on into the upper atmosphere, powered by a rocket motor. It then glides back to Earth and performs a conventional runway landing. The spaceship was officially unveiled to the public on Monday, 7 December 2009, at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The aircraft is currently (2012) undergoing flight-testing, having conducted 22 successful gliding flight tests as of August 2012.

The Dream Chaser is a space plane concept studied and developed by the North-American company Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC).

It is designed to be a crewed suborbital and orbital vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing (VTHL) lifting-body space plane. The Dream Chaser design is planned to carry up to seven people to and from low earth orbit. The vehicle would launch vertically on an Atlas V and land horizontally on conventional runways.

Headquartered at Mojave Air and Space Port, The Spaceship Company is the aerospace production company, founded by Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, which will be building a fleet of commercial spaceships (SpaceShipTwos) and carrier aircraft (WhiteKnightTwos) intended to make regular, commercial, manned space travel a reality.

The company has announced plans to build three WhiteKnightTwo aircraft and five SpaceShipTwo rocket planes.