Helping New Space Industry Lift Off

Washington Post ^ | September 27, 2004 | Mark Stencel

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Flying the first commercial test pilot into space three months ago was more than a feat of entrepreneurial engineering. SpaceShipOne's maiden flight just beyond the edge of the atmosphere also required a little bureaucratic ingenuity from Patricia Grace Smith and her staff at the Federal Aviation Administration.

The privately financed rocket plane, which makes its second scheduled test flight to space Wednesday, flies under the regulatory wing of Smith's Office of Commercial Space Transportation. Since 1984, the office has been in charge of licensing dozens of U.S. commercial space launches. Until recently, all those launches involved the kind of expendable, unmanned rockets that have carried satellites and other payloads on one-way trips to space for nearly 50 years.

That changed with a series of experimental flights that culminated in June when test pilot Michael W. Melvill fired SpaceShipOne's rocket high above California's Mojave Desert and soared 62 miles above Earth to the fringes of suborbital space.

Watching the rocket's trail from a private airport runway far below was an "unparalleled thrill," recalled Smith, 55, an associate administrator at the FAA who has worked on commercial space flight issues for 10 years.

Smith's office provided the regulatory go-ahead for the flight, and Smith awarded the first commercial astronaut wings to Melvill at a ceremony after the pilot landed the stubby, white spacecraft.

SpaceShipOne's designer, aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, had much experience certifying experimental aircraft with the FAA. But licensing a reusable commercial spacecraft designed to carry human payloads raised complicated legal and regulatory questions for the FAA and Rutan's Mojave company, Scaled Composites LLC:

[hedgetrimmer]

A good luck bump to the SpaceShip One crew.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Bump!!