SpaceShipOne and Wild Fire to Go For the Gold

Fizzleboink writes "Space.com reports that with the upcoming January 1, 2005 deadline for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, Rutan and his team have given their official 60 day notice. Brian Feeney, leader of the Canadian da Vinci Project also reported today that his team is rolling out on August 5 with the balloon-lofted Wild Fire rocket."

Comments

Re:Is this supposed to be a new form of mass trans

[AKAImBatman]

No, it's not supposed to be a new form of transit. It's a new form of developing space hardware in the private sector. Early NASA and USSR flights focused on putting a man up high enough, then bringing him back down. That allowed them to test airframe, recovery methods, and engines without jumping straight to building a Saturn V. The knowledge gained from these flights was then used to put Yuri Gugarin (sp?) and John Glenn into actual orbit.

The point of the 100km flight is to reproduce much of that research. If we end up with 10 engines that can make the altitude, then at least some of those engines and airframes may be scalable to orbital flight. Even if they aren't, certain points in their design may be useful in designing cheaper and better airframes and engines.

Re:And James van Allen doesn't get it.

[AuMatar]

I'm not so sure its niche. If I could fly to europe in 2 hrs, I could make it a weekend trip. As it is now, it'd have to be a week vacation. I'd definitely be buying some tickets.

Re:Interesting Numbers

[Coryoth]

You do realize that, as far as designing reusable space faring vehicles goes, $20 million is practically nothing and qualifies as a "true 'backyard' effort" as far as the aerospace industry is concerned?

I agree that it would be nice to see the Da Vinci Project do well, but as it stands it's pretty much untested. It's worth noting that Scaled was doing test flights over a year ago. Da Vinci could work, but I have yet to be convinced. It will certainly be interesting to see how it pans out.

Don't write Scaled off just because they have some cash behind them - in aerospace terms they have hardly any cash behind them (it costs way more just to buy a 747 than they've spent on the entire design, construction and testing of their project so far).

Jedidiah.