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Virgin Galactic commercial spaceship reaches ‘Weight on Wheels’ milestone

Air January 15, 2020

Virgin Galactic’s second commercial spaceship has reached a ‘Weight on Wheels’ milestone and is closer to completion.

The company has announced that its second commercial spaceship has reached a milestone with all of its important structural elements complete, and was able to deploy landing gear and carry its own weight for the first time. With the spaceship now capable of bearing its own weight, the assembly team is hard at work connecting the vehicle’s integrated systems, including the flight control systems from fuselage to tail booms, as well as completing the final structural closeouts.

As this work is completed, the spaceship will be positioned in the hangar for the start of integrated vehicle ground testing, which will verify the integrity of all systems. The Virgin Galactic spaceship fleet is already advancing to its third spaceship, also currently under construction in Mojave.

CEO of Virgin Galactic George Whitesides said: “Reaching the Weight on Wheels milestone considerably faster than was achieved for VSS Unity is a huge accomplishment and is a testament to the growing expertise and capabilities of the company.”

“We now have two spaceships that are structurally complete, with our third making good progress. These spaceships are destined to provide thousands of private astronauts with a truly transformative experience by performing regular trips to space.”

Structural and system part fabrication for the third vehicle is now over 50% complete. Virgin Galactic is in the final stages of development, having already completed multiple crewed flights of its vehicle into space, and anticipates initial commercial launch in 2020.

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Post written by: Ciara Houghton