New factory in Mojave to produce White Knight spacecraft for Virgin Galactic space tourism

The Los Angeles Times today reports that The Spaceship Company, or TSC—the joint venture owned by Burt Rutan‘s Mojave-based Scaled Composites and Richard Branson’s space tourism company Virgin Galactic—are building a production facility at the Mojave Air and Space Port where the world’s first fleet of commercial spaceships will be built.

TSC plans to finish the 68,000-square-foot facility by September, 2011. “It expects to build three White Knight aircraft, which resemble massive flying catamarans, and five smaller SpaceShipTwo rocket planes,” according to the LA Times.