Racing to space

Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites and the VSS Enterprise

Rutan has been working with Richard Branson on the Virgin Galactic VSS Enterprise project -- also known as SpaceShipTwo -- racing to be the first commercial airliner to launch travelers into orbit. They unveiled the completed spaceship, which will take off from Spaceport American in New Mexico sometime next year, at a grand production in the Mojave Desert this winter.

The first model of the aircraft, known as SpaceShipOne, won Rutan and the team at Scaled Composites the $10-million Ansari X Award for creating and launching a spacecraft that could carry three people 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface twice within two weeks.

The second model, SS2, boasts a design that’s been tweaked to carry more passengers with a better viewing area. The SS2 will be attached to her WK2 mother ship, which will carry SS2 to above 50,000 feet before the spaceship is dropped and fires her rocket motor to launch into space.

What’s even more extraordinary about the VSS Enterprise is that it was designed with the environment in mind: Carbon composite materials were utilized in construction and it is powered by four Pratt and Whitney PW308A engines, which they believe are some of the most powerful, economic and efficient commercial jet engines available.

Dr. Byron K. Lichtenberg of Zero Gravity Corp.

This astronaut, former combat pilot and mechanical engineer is the brains behind the Zero Gravity Corp., which sends tourists into the zero gravity experience by taking them into parabolic flight. Lichtenberg and his team constructed G-Force One, a modified Boeng 747, to show adventurers what absolute weightlessness feels like.

G-Force One’s parabolic flight patterns allow travelers to experience zero gravity, lunar gravity (one-sixth of body weight) and Martian gravity (one-third of body weight). The flights, where travelers experience about eight minutes of weightlessness, depart regularly from Cape Canaveral and Titusville, Fla., and Las Vegas. On occasion, they also run flights out of Los Angeles.

The basic $4,950 flights include training from a professional astronaut, 15 parabolas, a flight suit and other swag and souvenirs.

In addition to providing Buzz Lightyear wanna-bes with the only weightless experience outside outer space, Lichtenberg is also the co-founder and trustee of the X Prize Foundation, which hosts worldwide contests to push the world’s thinkers to create solutions for the largest problems facing our planet. There are currently contests being held in the areas of genomics, world hunger, and energy and the environment.

krista.simmons@latimes.com