SpaceShipOne on Thursday flight
Posted on 05/13/2004 9:18:35 PM PDT by Bobby777
Firm is competing for the $10 million X Prize
Aircraft designer Burt Rutan and his firm Scaled Composites took a giant leap early Thursday toward becoming the first private company to send a person into space.
Scaled Composites, funded by Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen, set a new civilian altitude record of 40 miles in a craft called SpaceShipOne during a test flight above California's Mojave Desert.
The firm is one of 24 companies from several countries competing for the X Prize, which will go to the first privately funded group to send three people on a 62.5-mile-high suborbital flight and repeat the feat within two weeks using the same vehicle.
The nonprofit X Prize Foundation is sponsoring the contest to promote the development of a low-cost, efficient craft for space tourism in the same way prize competitions stimulated commercial aviation in the early 20th century.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
WOW!!!
Too neat.
Hopefully, only private GOOD GUYS are allowed in their private spaceships in space.
That means stale peanuts instead of gourmet meals? They'll probably stop at the space station gift shop so vacationers can buy overpriced junk souvenir ashtrays.
What the heck is a guy at age 62 doing this for?
I want a shot, !
let's see those backward Islamic countries match that ... oh, wait, they've yet to build their first fighter airplane ...
astounding accomplishment ... though I'm glad not to have been the first guy ... but what a thought ... this could be a (reasonably) cheap way to climb into orbit ... I don't know what ticket would sell for, but a ride to even 125,000 feet would be AWESOME ...
Wdonder if they will put a Stuckey's in orbit. Wouldn'at want to miss those seashell collections and pecan rolls.
I read that Rutan will soon make an anouncement on his next flight. He needs to give a 30 day warning for an X-Prize attempt. This could be it!
Good luck to them!(even though Paul Allen doesn't need the money)
and do you remember the Nickerson Farms with the Hot Roast Beef Sandwich and Mashed Potatoes? ... they had a red roof and those little license plates with 10,000 different names on them ... when I was a little kid I could browse that little shop for an hour ... I thought all that stuff was so neat ...
I just hope the flight control computer isn't running Windows 95 with First Aid 95 ...
seriously though, the civilian / military possibilities are (literally) out of this world ... and I dare say, copycats will create potential security issues in the future ...
of course, we already had a 30,000mph (terminal speed) ASAT launch from the belly of an F-15 back in 1985 ...
Yeah so could I. The ashtrays made form Ozark cedar, the jars of jelly and jam, and let us not forget the handmade puzzles and toys for kids. What a world. On route 66...
There was a person in that thing?!?! Yikes. This was no model rocket. How did they test the flight controls for supersonic flight?
If this keeps up, the Smithsonian is going to have to build a Rutan wing for all his aircraft and spacecraft.
it's a little scary taking a ride up to 212,000 feet first time ... there's not a lot of room for error ... remember Chuck Yeager falling from about 100,000 feet in that F-104? ... I think he had a hard time getting the nose down (though there were hydrazine rockets in the nose, I think) ... then he got burned when he separated from the ejection seat by one of the spent rocket nozzles on the chair ... ouch ...
thought you might find this interesting ...
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