The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation has awarded to Virgin Galactic the operator license it needs to move forward with taxi and flight tests for SpaceShipTwo, the company announced this week. SpaceShipTwo is the passenger-carrying vehicle that ultimately will be carried to about 50,000 feet by WhiteKnightTwo. From that altitude, SpaceShipTwo will be released and its own rocket engine ignited to carry a pilot and passengers to the edge of space. Virgin Galactic also said it has begun taxi tests with the vehicle, towed behind a Land Rover. “This test is an important step towards the flight-test program,” the company said in a news release. “We couldn’t be more proud of our team and their hard work to reach both milestones.”
The current SpaceShipTwo, christened VSS Unity, has been modified from the original version, which was lost during a test flight in 2014. Virgin says it has been working with the FAA for several years to attain the operator license, which required an in-depth review of the vehicle’s system design, safety analysis and flight trajectory analysis. “We still have much work ahead to fully test this spaceship in flight,” said Mike Moses, senior vice president of operations for Virgin Galactic. He added, “I am confident that our world-class team is up to the challenge.”
