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Hmm, interesting. I wonder why they spun it off — doesn't seem to make sense from Galactic's POV. Leadership dispute?

• antonvs 6y ago
  Galactic's mission is essentially unrelated to space, beyond providing a short peek at it. Sending a plane up to the edge of space for a brief period with passengers aboard barely overlaps what's needed to put anything in orbit. It makes sense that they'd be different companies.
  • m4rtink 6y ago
    Not to mention Virgin Orbit actually doing something useful after lot less time and likely money invested. Virgin Galactic has been working on their sub-orbital rocketplane since 2004 and they have yet to fly any paying customers. For something that should have been "just like Space Ship One but bigger" it has been taking ages and might not make much sense if they ever get it working (eq. you might as well buy a seat on a proper commercial Dragon orbital flight).
    • antonvs 6y ago
      Yeah. I've always been a big Virgin Galactic skeptic. It seemed like a sort of a stunt from the beginning. "Dangerous joyrides which briefly reach the edge of space" might appeal to some people, but is otherwise a spectacularly useless and ridiculously expensive activity. It mainly seems to be a sort of playground for (originally) Bert Rutan to inadvertently prove that his ideas about planes and low-tech systems don't really translate to this sort of application. Nice work if you can get it, maybe. Thank you for attending my TED rant.