SPY PICTURE: Exclusive first image of Virgin Galactic's White Knight II with wing fitted

Rob Coppinger has posted a picture showing Scaled Composites White Knight Two suborbital-space launch system under contruction, at his blog site:

This world exclusive first image of Virgin Galactic's White Knight II (WK2) with its wing attached to its fuselages shows the port side forward fuselage, WK2 has two such booms

There's also a news article at Flightglobal:

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo (SS2) carrier aircraft White Knight II (WK2) is under construction at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California and Flightglobal has obtained the first image showing the wing attached.

The quality of the photo reflects that fact that it was taken at extreme distance from the hangar and from an elevated position.

They also have a collection of all the photos and concept drawings of SpaceShipTwo released by Virgin Galactic (White Knight II is the sub-orbital portion of the two part launch system).

Artist's interpretation. Credit: Virgin Galactic

Great work guys! Nice to see some progress being made!

[edit on 30-6-2008 by Ian McLean]

I am glad you posted this...been wondering what had happened to the project!

Cool.

Pretty soon those commerical flights are going to spawn an awful lot of space pilots.

That would be a sweet job to have... if you could stand the weightlessness. Perhaps the 'space Hilton' of 2001 was only a couple of decades off? That's an encouraging thought. Long ways to go still!

Thanks, Ian, for the info!
Wow, like looking at the future. Burt Rutan's ideas and what has come out of Scaled Composites have always been so far out there. So unlike what usually is up there, it makes you do a double take. Genius.

The possibilities of space travel like this...for me, a fun thing to imagine...