A production facility that would build the world's first fleet of commercial spaceships is set to begin construction Tuesday at the Mojave Air and Space Port.
The 68,000-square-foot facility, one of the first aircraft assembly plants to be built in the region in decades, will be home to the Spaceship Co., or TSC -- a joint venture owned by Mojave-based Scaled Composites and British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company.
TSC hopes to complete the complex by September 2011. It expects to build three White Knight aircraft, which resemble massive flying catamarans, and five smaller SpaceShipTwo rocket planes.
The rocket planes would be used this way: A rocket plane with six passengers on board, attached to the wings of the White Knight mother ship, would be flown to 50,000ft, where it would be released. Then the rocket engine would ignite and propel the plane into suborbit.
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