Reaching for the stars

by Megan Wynes | July 1, 2010

Megan Wynes meets Will Whitehorn, the man fulfilling a life-long ambition of putting people into space

Like most little boys who grew up in the 1960s, Will Whitehorn wanted to be an astronaut. At the age of nine he watched fuzzy black and white images of Neil Armstrong taking ‘one small step for man’ in his living room in Edinburgh and dreamed that commercial travel to space would become a real possibility in his lifetime.

He was right to aim for the stars.

“Our generation thought it would happen quite quickly as space exploration had developed so rapidly, but we didn’t realise at the time that it was costing the US Government nearly 10 per cent of its GDP.

“It’s a dream come true to be able to fulfil those ambitions with Virgin Galactic. It wasn’t a dream I was obsessed with, in fact I completely forgot about it for decades, so when this project looked like it would become a reality, that was a really exciting moment.”

And the reality is really very exciting. The largest 100 per cent carbon composite plane ever built, VMS Eve, named after Richard Branson’s mother, has already completed its test flight programme, and the first ‘captive carry’ test flights of the VSS Enterprise (the actual spaceship) took place in March this year.

Now, the Virgin Galactic team, along with their American partners, Scaled Composites, is ready to take the next step.

“So far we’ve had no problems through the test flying programme. It’s good news as we move towards the first flight into space, which will probably be at the back end of next year.

“There’s going to be a lot of flying before we take it into space. We’ve already taken it up to 50,000ft, which is the launch altitude.

“The next stage is to put a pilot in it, so we can test out all the avionics. Then around September, the spaceship will be dropped for the first time and the pilot will have to glide it all the way back down to the Mojave Air and Spaceport in California.”

The VSS Enterprise, also 100 per cent carbon composite, is essentially a glider, only using rocket propulsion to climb into space after being released from the mothership.

A feat of aeronautical engineering, the technology is very simple, explains Whitehorn.

“Tests will go on into 2011 and then the rocket motor will be installed inside the spaceship. Firstly, we’ll fire it and then glide down, then we’ll fire it and go supersonic. Once this happens, it will be climbing towards space into the ionosphere, the mesosphere, and then eventually through the Kármán Line, which is the official designation of space, at about 100km.”