Starlight carries not only energy but momentum. Comet tails, for example, are the result of light blowing dust off the comet’s core. It’s not a lot of juice, but it’s enough.

The force on a solar sail is gentle, if not feeble, but unlike a rocket, which fires for a few minutes at most, it is constant. Over days and years a big enough sail, say a mile on a side, could reach speeds of hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, fast enough to traverse the solar system in 5 years. Riding the beam from a powerful laser, a sail could even make the journey to another star system in 100 years, that is to say, a human lifespan.

We’re pretty damned far off from a person riding the light to whatever planet Avatar is set on, but it’s still a pretty neat idea. [NY Times]

“Most people think it’s a spaceship,” Schaller said of his silver creation that measures 56 feet long, 20 feet wide and 17 feet tall. “It was originally designed to be a hovercraft. Now it looks like it’s going to end up as a houseboat. I won’t live long enough to get enough money to make it a hovercraft – not unless I went back to work full time; and then I wouldn’t have the time to work on it.”

Much of the vessel is constructed out of found materials—like a travel trailer he found in the woods, a former acid dipping vat from the Piper Aircraft plant and an old satellite dish. It’s brilliant—like a free association sculpture from a genius engineer. Seriously, this guy built his first solid-fuel jet engine in a high school shop class. I built a toolbox. Advantage: Schaller. [TCPalm via Fark]

725.35 meters. A whoppumental 2,379.75 feet. That’s how big the new super-sized Enterprise is. Here you can see it compared against the Battlestar Galactica, the good old Enterprise, the Blockade Runner, and the ISS.

Click on this image to see the full picture.

When JJ Abrams said that he wanted to put some Star Wars into Star Trek, apparently it also applied to the scale of spaceships (and matching viewscreens.) And while the new Enterprise doesn’t even reach half of the 1,600 meters—that’s a mile long—of an Imperial Star Destroyer, it’s still amazingly big compared to the 288 meters of the old Enterprise. Maybe now you would be able to take down a Star Destroyer with a couple of these.

The battle I would really want to see now, however, is not the old Star Trek vs Star Wars (we already know who would win that one.) No, you know what I want to see.

Yes, Starbuck vs Uhura. In a chocolate pudding pit.

Maybe Galactica vs Enterprise too, but that’s a distant second. [Thanks to David B. from Bad Robot Productions]

Will Whitehorn has worked at Virgin for 22 years. Before he ran Galactic, which he named, he did search and rescue for Sir Richard Branson’s world-record-attempt balloon flights, and flew helis for British Airways. I got him on the phone for a few minutes to talk about space travel.

How’d Virgin get into the business of civilian space flight?
Sir Richard has always been into space. In the ’80s, he was in touch with Gorbechev about getting into the Soyuz. And his first movie produced was The Space Movie [commissioned by NASA to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Apollo mission].

But Virgin Galactic’s origins began with a conversation between me, Buzz Aldrin and Sir Richard Branson in the winter of 1996. We asked him why the American space program never launched crafts from air. Buzz explained that the US had the X-15 project in the ’60s and they did test launches from a balloon before, and that the US did these experiments when Buzz was a pilot for the Navy in the ’50s.

In 1999 we decided to register the name Virgin Galactic, not knowing where we’d find a spacecraft.

In 2003, Steve Fossett and Virgin cofunded the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, a plane Fossett would [use to] circumnavigate [the earth] on a single tank of fuel, setting a record. I was watching Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites build the flyer, and noticed he had a small spacecraft in the corner of his factory—it being the ship [SpaceShipOne] that Paul Allen was funding for the [Ansari] X Prize.

That’s how we found our ship builder.

How are your customers going to be prepped for space?
There’s a three-day training program in our New Mexico facility where, among other things, they’ll get G-force training. We’ve tested 100 of them already using a centrifuge, so they’ll understand the forces. If you look at the WhiteKnightTwo [launch vehicle], the starboard hull has an identical cabin to the space ship [see below], and the WhiteKnight has the unique ability to be an astronaut training vehicle, creating forces up to 7Gs. And it can be used as a zero-G flying plane, so passengers can experience G forces and zero G. When White Knight is bringing SpaceShipTwo and its load of passengers into orbit, it is also training the next day’s travellers in its hull.

What’s the in-flight entertainment going to be like?
The in flight entertainment system won’t be like a normal entertainment system. Every customer will have a record of their flight. And lots of data: They’ll see how many G’s they sustained on the way up, they’ll see what time they’ve arrived, etc. Of course, the best in flight entertainment of all will be the view of the Planet Earth; you’ll be able to see the blue planet and the blackness of space while you’re weightless.

When’s the price coming down to $US10,000?
Once the program gets regularised, and we get enough volume, we will be able to reduce the costs. But we believe after 3 to 5 years, we can get it down to $US100,000 from $US200,000. We can get it down to $US100,000 but don’t think we’ll get it down to $10,000.

Gravity doesn’t go on sale.
Gravity doesn’t give you a discount.

Have you already started engineering the zero-g airsickness bags?
NASA already makes one. They’re easy to get. But of our 100 customers that we put through the centrifuge, none felt ill from the test.

What other plans do you have for Virgin Galactic?
It’s also an industrial and scientific system. We’ll bring scientists into space to do microgravity experiments. And we can launch small unmanned rockets or satellites into space, up to 200 kilos, much more cheaply and safely than ever before.

Why should we send people into space?
Stephen Hawking believes that too many scientists in the ’80s and ’90s got into the mindset that we could just send robots into space. But he said it’s wrong to think that way, because humans need to explore. And we now know enough about our planet that we know that a catastrophic event will happen in the next few thousand years—volcanic or otherwise—which would have the propensity to wipe us out. We have to have the ability to leave the planet, and we’re only going to be able to do this if we develop manned space flight.

Get Me Off This Rock: Gizmodo’s week long dedication to the idea of human life in space.

There’s also the matter of the major planets all somehow appearing in the night sky alongside the Moon, but whatever. The pics are cool, in a steam punky, biplanes-in-space kind of way, and all those people on the open air observation decks sure have a great view! [Infomercantile via Dark Roasted Blend]

[NASA's Orion at Gizmodo]

Click on the image above to see a larger version of the cutaway

HOTOL was initially developed by the British during the 80s, back when the US was pushing the space shuttle. Unlike the shuttle, it was an horizontal take-off and landing concept that used concepts like “heat exchangers, oxidiser cooled combustion chamber, or adaptive nozzles” instead of the classic rocket technology available at that time. The concept was so hot back then that the US government was secretly looking into it as a potential technology to use themselves.

Today, a company called Reaction Engines is working in reviving HOTOL into a new project called Skylon. The engineers—who used to work in HOTOL—have just got a good chunk of money from the European Union, and are working with a $US8.7 million budget to jump start the new aircraft.

Skylon will be as long as the Concorde and carry 15,400-pound payloads to low Earth orbit into its 15-foot diameter cargo bay.

[Flight Global]

You can hit the guy’s blog for new concepts, or buy his 2007 book—$US19.77 isn’t a lot for all those vehicles plus the impossibly hot women Daniel likes to draw as pilots and pit crew. The vibe, as you can see in the gallery, is somewhere between Star Wars and Firefly, with a touch of Talladega Nights thrown in for good measure.

[Daniel Simon via io9]

According to Flight Global, The Government wants to develop a rocket, dubbed “LauncherOne,” to sit on the back of WhiteKnightTwo and when the craft reaches the proper altitude, launch off on its own to begin orbit. The microsatellites would be under 200kg in weight, though it’s unclear exactly what the satellites will do. But with all these add-ons, WhiteKnightTwo is starting to remind me of The Centurions or something. [Flight Global via The Register]