Starship enterprise: the next generation

I believe this is the article in the Economist magazine that Pat referred to this morning related to SSA.

More of the article after the jump.

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10566293


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Jan 24th 2008 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

A fleet of privately financed spaceships is emerging. It heralds a new business in space travel

Virgin Galactic

THE way Will Whitehorn tells it, the story began in 2003 in Mojave, California, on a visit to Scaled Composites, a company with a reputation for designing and building futuristic and sometimes wacky-looking aircraft. Mr Whitehorn is one of the top brass in Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group; and Virgin Atlantic, Sir Richard's airline, was sponsoring Global Flyer, a Scaled Composites creation, on a non-stop voyage around the world. On his way out of the factory Mr Whitehorn saw something unusual and asked what it was. Burt Rutan, head of Scaled Composites, told him it was a spaceship. He was building it for another customer, but he couldn't say any more.