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Sure, the first stage is easy from an energy perspective, so SpaceshipOne is a good model for that. From what I understand they intend to try to use the same i

• Gravityloss 14y ago
  Though Virgin Galactic is very far from orbit yet. They've been doing glide flights with SpaceshipTwo for years since their big hybrid rocket motor has not been progressing very fast and even had a ground accident. Stuff like that can happen if an airplane body company builds a rocket ship. We can draw a lot of lessons from the space shuttle - it was very successful in lifting re-entries. It takes a huge amount of expensive wind tunnel and test time to develop something like this. Why STS was so expensive must be analyzed more deeply - we definitely can not afford to waste all the lessons learned in that program. I think, in details, it contained many technologies that were not robust and required lots of checking and hand work (people with salaries). This also made it less reliable. Strategically, it was a huge one off program, meaning there was no possibility of iteration and trial and error: feeding information from operations back to improving design. (Cue Gall's law.) Since development is so expensive (afaik a lot of the testing infrastructure has been driven down), this is also why most space capsules use known-to-work shapes: Vostok, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or Soyuz. Some small capsule designs have even used Corona spysat film return canister shape.