Mojave air and spaceport can still call itself that after a May award of a new licence to operate horizontal type launches. In 2004 for the X Prize SpaceShipOne (SS1) flights the airport was awarded a licence for launches by the White Knight, SS1 system into space and it was to expire this year on 17 June
Earlier this year Mojave’s operations manager Bob Rice told Hyperbola that the airport had submitted a new application to cover the work it expected to do with SpaceShip Two. He said it had a specific number of test flights as part of that application but Rice declined to say how many that figure was
The US Federal Aviation Administration’s office of commercial space transportation told Hyperbola that it could confirm that the licence had been renewed and that it was for five years and it was open ended on flight numbers but the launch system had to remain the same
An article in an Australian publication from April mentions a test flight number of 30 but over the years Hyperbola has heard a range of figures, slightly lower and substantially higher
And are those test flights all into space or does it include the early drop/glide tests, supersonic rocket powered level flights before the ascents and any other flight regime testing they wish to do that is not above 100km (62miles)?
All questions that can be asked of Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn at the Royal Aeronautical Society’s space tourism conference taking place here in London on Tuesday 30 June
