This year we had Mike Melvill (the first commercial astronaut) give us a talk at the Academy as part of a program where we have several interesting individuals come and talk (mostly about character and honor, but there are some good ones, and this was the best) and it was very interesting. He showed us a video of the whole flight and pointed out several trivia. He gave the talk to mostly Aeronautical and Astronautical engineering USAF cadets, and so he pointed out some differences between how Scaled Composites did things, and how the USAF would have done things. Some were very interesting, and he surely scared some of the officers in the room. For example, the fuel tank was made out of carbon fiber in California, at a company that usually makes car parts or some such deal. It was the biggest part they had done. There were no spares and if it had blown up on any of the tests they did, the whole project would have been set back by a year at least due to the cost. They had no access to a wind tunnel, but instead tested every part by hooking it up to a truck and speeding down the runway to assess its aerodynamic characteristics. The thing sat directly behind the pilot's seat. Mike flew with just a Nomex flight suit and an oxygen mask, no special space suit due to weight and space issues in the cockpit. The pressurization system consisted of an oxygen tank and a pressure gauge inside the cockpit. If the oxygen level falls below a certain limit, the pilot opens up the tank so that more oxygen is entering the cockpit from the tank than exiting the cockpit from the leaks that everyone knew the plane had. After reaching its max altitude, the pilot just hits a lever and the wings rotate 90 degrees up. The pilot then sits back and enjoys the ride and the plane just falls on its own, following the laws of physics. After a certain altitude, the pilot again hits the switch and the wings rotate back and the plane becomes a really fast glider. There are no forward windows since the instrument panel covers the whole front portion of the canopy, so as soon as the pilot turns into final, he relies on guidance from the secondary pilot in an Extra 300 (the same that the pilots trained in to be able to sustain the G's involved in the pitch up from release into straight up for the ride into space, as a centrifuge was all but impossible to get, since only the military and NASA have those). The Extra pilot then guides the spaceship pilot to a soft landing without running out of runway. Also, you'll notice in the pictures that the Virgin logo isn't in the front and big like it would be expected of the main sponsor, instead it's in the back next to the rocket exhaust. This is because the camera for the flight was located on the inside of the vertical stabilizer looking into the fuselage, and the logo is the first thing you see from this angle... pretty smart move...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXNkUNP75-Q
