Burt Rutan said that White Knight II (WK2) could launch a two-stage rocket and put a single person into low Earth orbit, at the end of the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo (SS2) and WK2 press conference
Flight learnt that WK2 has a 13,600kg (30,000lb) payload capacity sometime back
And in August 2004 Rutan told the Royal Aeronautical Society that he could envisage an orbital transportation system
As a very crude rule of thumb a payload is about 10% of a launch vehicle and its payloads combined gross lift off weight
So with a 13,600kg payload, a 1,300kg capsule could be launched, in theory. If you assume the passenger has an “average” mass of 90kg then there is 1,20kg left for the spaceship’s systems. Not much
Despite this fantastic claim Burt said that he did not have a customer for his one-person LEO spaceship and that Scaled only built vehicles for customers
Fishing for a contract, Burt?
