Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo completes first manned glide flight

The Virgin Galactic VSS Enterprise (SpaceShipTwo) today reached a new milestone: completing a manned free flight from over 45,000 feet, then gliding down to land at Mojave Air and Spaceport, in California.

During its first flight the spaceship was piloted by Pete Siebold, assisted by Mike Alsbury as co-pilot. The two main goals of the flight were to carry out a clean release of the spaceship from its mothership and for the pilots to free fly and glide back and land at Mojave Air and Space Port in California.

More about today's accomplishments here.

(Photo by Mark Greenberg: VSS Enterprise glides back towards Mojave Space Port.)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Lobster

Engineer: We had a successful test flight, Sir Branson.
Sir Richard Branson, (esq.): Excellent! Make it look 10% cooler and test it again.
Engineer: But… the design works as-
SRB(e): MAKE IT COOLER!
Walt Guyll

According to Boing Boing commentators, the Simpson’s couch gag by Banksy is ten times more noteworthy than new spaceships.
- imag
  
  Comment quantity seems generally to be driven more by controversy than interest. If something is cool, there often isn’t more that needs to be said.
  
  I would love to see click-through stats on BB articles though…
Scuba SM

They were evidently interested in the airflow on the bottom half of the engine nacelle. You can see the small streamers there.
Chrs

That is one spectacular machine.
imajication

Tackiest spaceship ever.

Though come to think of it, perhaps NASA should sell advertising space on their vessels.
- Brainspore
  
  Sure the logos are a little distracting, but that’s still a pretty sexy profile for any spaceship. Maybe if NASA had painted pinup girls on the shuttle fleet’s cockpits then they wouldn’t have to fight so hard for funding.
  
  @Walt Guyll #6: What imag said. “Noteworthy” doesn’t always translate to “comment worthy,” some things just speak for themselves.
Michael Smith

I wonder if they had a real engine behind that dust cover. Isn’t it part of the structure? Probably has to be glued in to make the thing structural.
PaulR

El Reg had a much more accurate headline:
“Branson ‘spaceship’ successfully falls off mothership”
- sapere_aude
  
  :-)
  
  While this is a really neat aircraft, calling it a “spaceship” is a bit of a stretch. An “edge-of-spaceship” perhaps. But I don’t think that something deserves to be called a “spaceship” until it can at least achieve Low Earth Orbit.
  
  Nonetheless, it’s still pretty cool; and this maiden manned test flight is an important step toward getting this thing fully operational. It shows that the craft can be hoisted to altitude by its mothership, that the two can separate in midair without any problems, and that the craft can glide to a safe landing — all of which are essential. But the headline you cited is very apt: Basically, it did just fall off its mothership.