Scaled Composites White Knight Two
White Knight Two is a newly developed carrier aircraft type to transport the space plane SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of about 15 kilometers before it is notched out there and with rocket propulsion is taking a suborbital space flight. White Knight Two is powered by four turbofan jet engines and payload reached a height of 18 km.
White Knight Two is in contrast to its predecessor, White Knight, a twin-hulled aircraft ( See also: Aircraft structures). It has about a half times its wingspan and can carry almost 5 times as much load as its predecessor. Furthermore, the arrangement of the engines was changed and their number increased from two to four now. Both aircraft have two tails: White Knight Two has two cross- tail units, each located at one of the two hulls. In contrast, the predecessor two T- tails are attached to the wings. Both models start and end up like normal planes horizontally and carry the world space plane in the air. White Knight Two has been designed so that other payloads, such as smaller rockets to launch satellites, and other maneuvers, such as parabolic flights in preparation for space flight, are possible.
The first copy of the aircraft, called VMS Eve, was end of July 2008 presented to the public. The first one-hour test flight took place on December 21, 2008 ( 8:16 clock local time) Mojave Air & Space Port with Peter Siebold and Clint Nichols on board instead. It was preceded by three taxi tests. On March 22, 2010, the first nearly three-hour Carry -flight, in which the aircraft reached a maximum altitude of 13,716 m was carried out.
The first glide the aircraft space SpaceShipTwo took place seven months later. Designed and built which consists of carbon fiber- reinforced plastic construction of the U.S. company Scaled Composites in the context of the project animal 1b.