Virgin Galactic Signs Deal To Build Spaceport In New Mexico

$198M Facility To Be Completed In 2010

British billionaire Richard Branson signed a 20-year lease with the state of New Mexico last week to build the first US spaceport, and Virgin Galactic expects to break ground on the facility by April, with completion slated for sometime in 2010.

"The signing of this agreement is a momentous day for our state and has cemented New Mexico as the home of commercial space travel," Governor Bill Richardson said.

"I want to thank Virgin Galactic for partnering with us to create a whole new industry that is going to transform the economy of Southern New Mexico - creating thousands of jobs, generating money for education, boosting tourism and attracting other companies and economic opportunities to the area."

$140 million in state funds have been made available for the project, freed for use by the Federal Aviation Administration's grant of a launch license to the New Mexico Spaceport Authority. The launch site has previously been used by Lockheed Martin, Armadillo Aerospace, UP Aerospace, Microgravity Enterprises, and Payload Specialties.

The WhiteKnight Two mothership is powered by four Pratt and Whitney PW308A engines.

The WhiteKnight Two is the world's largest, all carbon composite aircraft; it has a unique high altitude lift capacity, capable of launching SpaceShip Two and its eight astronauts into sub-orbital space flight. For the price of $200,000, passengers will experience sub-orbital spaceflight and a brief period of zero-gravity.

FMI: www.spaceportamerica.com, www.virgingalactic.com

Carefully Timed Jerks Could Power Space Elevator

Hugh Pickens writes "BBC has an interesting article on the long-standing issue of how to power the 'climber' that would ascend a space elevator into space. Previous ideas have included delivering microwave or laser power to the climber beamed from the Earth's surface, but now European Space Agency ground station engineer Age-Raymond Riise has demonstrated a device that could provide a "lift into space" for cheaper space missions along a 100,000-km long tether anchored to the Earth. Riise demonstrated sending power mechanically by providing carefully timed jerks of the cable at its base with a broomstick to represent the cable held in tension, an electric sander to provide a rhythmic vibration to the bottom of the stick, and three brushes representing the climber with their bristles pointing downwards allowing the climber assembly to slide upward along the broomstick as it moved slightly downward, but grip it as it moved slightly upward. 'It would be possible to make a suspension system that completely decouples the cabin where the passengers are,' says Riise. 'For them it would be a linear movement with very little disturbance.' Riise says that he has been approached by commercial elevator companies, who are researching new ideas for elevators in superscrapers where the simplicity of the approach makes it attractive when compared to other ideas for powering lifts, such as compressed air."

Broken-up Asteroids Found Orbiting White Dwarfs

Astronomers studying white dwarfs have found the remains of "shredded" asteroids around some of these dead stars. This finding suggests that the same materials that make up Earth and our solar system's other rocky bodies could be common in the universe. If the materials are common, then rocky planets could be, too. "If you ground up our asteroids and rocky planets, you would get the same type of dust we are seeing in these star systems," said Michael Jura of the University of California, Los Angeles, who presented the results today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, Calif. "This tells us that the stars have asteroids like ours — and therefore could also have rocky planets." But most surprising, astronomers have been able to use the rocky debris to study the evolution of planets.
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