Spaceflight

SPY PICTURE: First image of Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo structure

By Rob Coppinger

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is under construction at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California and Flightglobal has obtained what appears to be the first image of its cockpit section.

The image below shows a cockpit that, while it shares some of the features of the White Knight II (WK2) fuselage, cockpit structure seen in this blog entry, it differs in a number of respects.

It is these differences that suggest that this cockpit structure is for the first SpaceShipTwo (SS2) flight model and not for the spacecraft's WK2 carrier aircraft.

Above: Scaled Composites' employees load the cockpit structure for transport

For more analysis of the differences go to this post at Rob Coppinger's Hyperbola blog.