Scaled Composites WhiteKnightTwo
The Mothership
“Two fuselages, four engines, one spaceship in the middle.”
Scaled Composites · private
Virgin Galactic's carrier aircraft is a catamaran of the sky: twin fuselages, cruciform tails, and a 141-foot wing with a spaceship-sized gap at its center. Built almost entirely of carbon composite, it carries SpaceShipTwo to 45,000 feet and lets go. Only one was ever completed, VMS Eve, named for Richard Branson's mother, and every Virgin Galactic flight to space has started under her wing.
WhiteKnightTwo is the only aircraft in the world whose job is to drop a spaceship. One exists, and it flies out of Spaceport America, New Mexico.
Unmistakable: two slim fuselages side by side under one long wing, with a gap between them. If something is hanging in that gap, you are about to see a spaceship launch.
One might be overhead right now.
Bogey turns the The Mothership from a dot in the sky into a card in your logbook.
