Burt Rutan has posted the slides from a presentation on Commercial Space Future Opportunities.

The presentation provides some interesting insights on Rutan’s personal vision for where SpaceShip Two is going. (This personal vision does not necessarily reflect the official policies of Virgin Galactic or even Scaled Composites, from which Rutan is now retired.)

For suborbital spaceflight, Rutan envisions “multi-spaceport operations with 40 spaceships” and competing spacelines flying over 100,000 people during the first 12 years of commercial operations. Although it is not explicitly stated, we’re guessing this means competing spacelines flying spaceships developed by Scaled Composites and does not consider competing designs. (Scaled has stated, in the past, that Virgin Galactic is the launch customer for SpaceShip Two but there would be other customers in the future.)

Rutan notes that ticket prices for suborbital flights are about 1% of those for orbital flights. He expects that prices for both will come down significantly as volume increases but the ratio between the two prices will remain about the same.

Written by Astro1 on August 22nd, 2012 , Scaled Composites, Virgin Galactic

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