Virgin Galactic Joins Two CCDev Teams

Virgin Galactic plans to market orbital flights for space tourists and scientists on two spaceplanes proposed under NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) effort, in the hope it can expand its business beyond the suborbital flights it is planning on its SpaceShipTwo vehicle.

The company has signed on as a teammate with both Orbital Sciences Corp. and Sierra Nevada Corp. in the second round of competition for NASA seed money to develop commercial human spacecraft that can deliver crews to the International Space Station. The space agency is offering $200 million in this round.

“We are now very close to making the dream of suborbital space a reality for thousands of people at a cost and level of safety unimaginable even in the recent past,” says Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic. “We know that many of those same people, including myself, would also love to take an orbital space trip in the future, so we are putting our weight behind new technologies that could deliver that safely whilst driving down the enormous current costs of manned orbital flight by millions of dollars.”

Both of Virgin’s teammates are basing their CCDev entries on winged spaceplanes that will take off vertically atop an expendable launch vehicle and return to a gliding runway landing.

Sierra Nevada, which won $20 million in the first CCDev competition to begin work on its Dream Chaser vehicle, will use the same hybrid-rocket technology that powers SpaceShipTwo, and has already built the tooling for its composite airframe.

“We are thrilled to have Virgin Galactic as part of our effort to make commercial orbital transportation a reality,” says Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president and head of Sierra Nevada Space Systems. “The knowledge gained in the development and promotion of the history-making SpaceShipTwo suborbital system will add considerably to our program.”

Orbital Sciences has announced a spaceplane entry for CCDev round two that builds on earlier NASA testbeds like the HL-10.

Thales Alenia will build its pressurized crew compartment, and Northrop Grumman will develop its composite airframe to a proprietary “blended lifting body” shape developed at Orbital.

“They have experience in this area,” says Frank Culbertson, Orbital’s senior vice president for human spaceflight systems, of the partnership with Virgin “They have contacted a lot of people around the world who are interested in flying for various reasons, and we think that there are other possibilities for using this spacecraft commercially that may or may not involve humans. We think it has a tremendous potential for the future of the company.”

Both companies’ vehicles are likely to launch on the Atlas V, at least initially, provided they win sufficient support from NASA to attract private investment to complete development under the partnership approach required in the CCDev program.

Branson, who told a commercial-spaceflight conference in October that he was negotiating with two companies for a CCDev partnership and planned to pick one of them, apparently decided to hedge his bets by joining both teams.

“Today’s announcement is an important step along the way to achieving our ultimate and long-term goal of leading an industry which opens up the huge potential of space to everyone, whether it be for the experience itself, for science research, for fast and efficient transportation around the globe or for delivering payloads to space safely, cleanly and cheaply,” Branson says.