我们知道维珍银河有希望使用其宽敞的太空飞船可重复使用的太空平面图，不仅仅是Joyrides进入零G，而是美国宇航局的新合同与刚起步的太空公司以及理查德·布兰森（Richard Branson）最古怪的合资企业是整个业务的里程碑。正如Virgin指出的那样，“这种安排标志着NASA与商业合作伙伴首次签约，以提供飞往海滨航天器的太空的航班。”
该决定来自NASA首席技术专家办公室，这是一些最具范式改变的来源件的消息从NASA开始，从技术上讲，这是一项计划的又一步，该计划已经看到了NASA技术在低空火箭上的飞行。And you can see why NASA’s made the decision: Inside the 3.7 by 2.3 meter cabin of a SpaceShipTwo, plenty of scientific payloads can be hauled up Earth’s gravity well to gain a precious few moments in the zero gravity of space–and there’s room for flight specialists too, who can monitor and tweak the experiments in a way that wouldn’t be possible on an automated low-altitude rocket.
It’s not the precise, long-duration environment that the interior of the Space Shuttle offered, nor the huge size of the labs aboard the International Space Station, but it’s cheap and accessible, and since the flights only last a couple of hours it’s possible to fly an experiment, do the research, wait for the ship to land, tweak it or load in a modified payload, and fly it again. Which opens up whole new vistas of academic and engineering research.
Virgin Galactic, the press release notes, is often considered a “space tourism company,” and it’s collected some $55 million in deposits from future space tourists, but it’s taking its role as a scientific lab assistant pretty seriously and has garnered assistance from the Southwest Research Institute,Nanoracks（他们已经是向国际空间站发送小规模实验的专家）以及许多其他太空飞行和有效载荷集成专家。
在一定程度上，NASA的手被绑住了。在空间业务的新时代，其商标航天飞机永远扎根NASA只有通过欧洲，俄罗斯和（几年）商业火箭的访问有限的访问权限，才必须寻找其他获取微重力的方法。尽管其他商业太空公司对其未来产生了很多噪音，但Virgin Galactic是唯一在高级飞行测试阶段拥有太空车的人。
[[图片：Flickr用户杰夫·福斯特（Jeff Foust）这是给予的
与此消息聊天套件伊顿在Twitter上和德赢提款也。