Burt Rutan and his crew over at Scaled Composites released concept photos of both SpaceShip 2 and White Knight 2 this week. The duo will be used by Virgin Galactic for commercial space tourism hopefully by the end of the year.
While SS2 seems to only have evolved nominally for increased capacity, it is WK2 that seems to have had a more dramatic transformation over its predecessor.
While a twin boom design is not that dramatic for Scaled, the twin fuselage concept is fairly radical. What I've yet to find out is whether these tandem fuselages will have mirror flight decks.
The other feature that shocked me was the 4 engines. 4 engines? Seems a little overly complicated, doesn't it. Preliminary drawings released last year showed a WK2 with two over-the-wing CF-34 class engines. That design seemed exceptionally reasonable to me. Now they've chosen to go with 4 under-the-wing PW308 engines instead. Interesting. I guess I'm no engineer so I'll save my perplexity for something else.
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