Hold onto your dollar bills, y'all -- the WhiteKnightTwo is set to be unveiled (and swooned over) on Monday. We knew the fabled space tourism vehicle was set to be unwrapped this month, but knowing that said event is merely hours away just gets our juices flowin'. Richard Branson and "other dignitaries" are preparing to officially launch the ship at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California (a short drive from Zzyzx, we hear), and we're still being led to believe that test flights should begin as early as this fall. Hey, at least you know what you're doing next year if your ship comes in.

[Via The Register]

While much of the attention surrounding Virgin Galactic's race to space tourism has surrounded its SpaceShipTwo, word has come that carrier ship WhiteKnightTwo will rollout in late July, and after some ground tests, take to the skies by September. With this rollout come some new details about the composite, twin-boom mothership, which Virgin Galactic is selling as an "open architecture" that they are clearly open to pimping for other applications. Says Prez Will Whitehorn, "WhiteKnightTwo is the world's most advanced payload carrier. It has the best fuel efficiency of any aircraft ever built in history. It is the world's first 100% carbon composite aircraft." They are even looking into using WhiteKnightTwo as a forest fire water bomber with its payload capacity. Nonetheless, we care because the giant ship that will carry rich people to space at $200,000 a pop is going to be flying by September. Press passes please?

As expected, Sir Richard Branson has just unveiled the final designs of SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two, Virgin Galactic's planned commercial "spaceliner" and its corresponding carrier plane. At today's American Museum of Natural History launch event, Branson once again reiterated his lofty expectations for space tech in general and the six-passenger vehicle in particular, promising to promote privatization and more widespread research by offering outside organizations access to its launch system schematics. So far, Virgin has reportedly signed up 200 committed passengers willing to pay $200,000 for a 2010-or-later suborbital flight, but for now, all they can do is look at the pretty pictures in the gallery below.

It's been just a few months since a test of an experimental motor for Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo passenger space vehicles caused a deadly explosion at the company's Mojave Desert facility, but we're hearing whispers today that the craft will be unveiled on January 23rd, along with the WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane. Testing of the six-person ship will apparently start in mid-2008, with the first commercial Virgin Galactic flight tentatively scheduled for the end of 2009. That seems hopelessly optimistic to us, but then again, we're not ones to doubt the awesome combined powers of Burt Rutan and Richard Branson.

This week is quickly becoming a tough one for the aerospace industry, as just a day after NASA reported tampering on an ISS bound computer, an explosion at the Mojave Air and Space Port has claimed two lives and seriously injured four others. The blast reportedly occurred during a "test of a new rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo -- a spaceship being built for Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's space tourism company." According to a spokeswoman for the spaceport, the blast was "on a remote pad" at an airport home to Scaled Composite (which is the builder of the first private manned rocket to reach space), but the firm's founder Burt Rutan wasn't in attendance when the "cold fire test" went awry.