the
spaceship technology would work, not in exploiting it commercially himself. That left Mr Rutan with a cool
spaceship, but no way of making money from it. vir
Galactic, a company in the Virgin stable and which
was headed by Mr Whitehorn, decided to license the
technology for Spaceshipone. Virgin Galactic said
it wanted to offer commercial sub-orbital flights to
Paying passengers by the end of the decade
O At an event hed at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, on January 23rd, the company
unveiled the design of its new generation of vehicles
and said that the first examples had almost been
finished
Air-launched rockets have a long history. Spaceshipone
was, in essence, vastly improved and much cheaper
versions of the X-15 rocket plane that set speed
and altitude records in the early 1960s and the B-52
bomber that carried the rocket plane under its wing. But
