Slashdot Mirror
SpaceShipOne Captures the X Prize
I got to Mojave yesterday evening (it's a long way from El Paso), slept in my car, and got to the airfield itself just before 4 a.m. Traffic on state highway 58 was brisk already, though not clogged (which it later became), and nearly every car was turning onto the two-lane entrance heading for acres of packed-dirt parking spaces near the runway from which SpaceShipOne would take off.
The crowd which built up in the following hours was surprisingly quiet on takeoff, which happened right at 7:45 local time. Not exactly hushed -- perhaps "hesitant" is a better word, or maybe just waking up. Only scattered clapping (guilty!) as the White Knight / SpaceShipOne piggyback duo lifted off, followed shortly by two chase planes, an AlphaJet and a Beechcraft Starship. The enthusiasm grew, though, as the flight progressed; a P.A. system kept the spectators informed of the trip's progress.
When SpaceShipOne finally separated and fired upward ("Good release, good release!" over the P.A, followed by enthusiastic cheering), it was after three separate two-minute warnings, then for one-minute and 30-second intervals. After an 84-second burn followed by a clean shutdown, SpaceShipOne coasted to its final altitude. At 90 seconds into the flight, the ship was well past 100,000 feet, and out of sight to the unaided eye. At 7:51, an altitude of 328,000 feet was reported, but the ship was still climbing for the next 40,000 feet under its own momentum. The reported peak altitude is enough to top the previous record, set by an X-15 at 354,200 ft. in 1963.
The descent was happily uneventful. At 60,000 feet, Binnie experienced "slight oscillations" -- consistent with previous flights, according to the announcer, who continued to count down the altitude. At approximately 45,000 feet, the conditions are right for contrails, and more cheering erupted when those popped into view. The crowd perked up and cheered even more with the first of two sonic booms audible on the ground (the booms that occur during ascent aren't), pointing and shading their eyes from the sun, following the ship as it traveled in wide arcs to bleed off the energy of the ascent, followed by a smooth 3-point landing.
(Special thanks to the members of the Foothill High School band who traveled the three hours from Orange County to watch the flight and play both before and after the flight. The launch itself was surprisingly low on ceremony, and their playing provided a bit of well-deserved pomp.)
Say what you will, but this guy is a true visionary and genius. First the round the world on a tank of gas flight, and now this.
Congrats to Paul Allen as well, for his vision and support.
On the webcast. Wow. I mean really - ok, it isn't the moon landings, but it is one of the more significant things I'm likely to see in my life I think.
I have to say, it brought a tear to my eye when they did it. Yo, America - you guys have something to be proud of today!
fortune -o
Its also a hell of a lot later than when NASA did the same, with technology that is more widespread and cheaper to boot. When NASA did their shots, it had to invent pretty much all of the technology, whereas Scaled Composites had the benefit of all the public knowledge now available about space travel. Not to put a cloud on this success, but come on guys, comparing it to NASA and saying its much cheaper just isnt fair.
>...repeatably (if only technically) reaching space, on a on a budget
>embarrassingly smaller than NASA's.
Let's see them reach orbital velocity and then I'll be impressed by the budget difference.
It is not that I am unimpressed by the flight, but I'm not really impressed by comparing the budgets of two totally different projects with totally different goals.
I watched the documercial last night on Discovery called Black Sky about the Scaled project, it's on again this week and there is a second piece coming up as well, it's worth watching.
After I watched it I was thinking about who it really shows as being behind the ball. Well NASA is the obvious choice, but NASA made an investment from the 70s on into Shuttle and with the tangled web they have to tread with Congress and internal inertia, I don't think we can say "Look, NASA sucks!"
Who it really makes look foolish, in my opinion, is the Chinese space program.
They have been ramping up for thier space program for decades, and thier way of doing it was to buy Russian hardware, reverse engineer it and then build it again. No one knows how much that cost the Chinese, but look at Scaled. 250 people and about 25 million in venture capital is running a space operation out in the desert. Yea they haven't orbited yet. But they will, I've read it costs about $80,000 in fuel and prep.
Oh, and cost US$200,000
And have a non-trivial chance of killing you
One day this will all be routine and our children's children will be fascinated that people went into space on those Saturn V powered mostrosities or even the space shuttles. You have to look past the present and visualize the future. After a few crotchety space stations, what's to stop someone from building a hotel/resort/convention center in space? Money. Practicality? Don't talk to me about practicality, I've been to enough convention centers and you oughta know people go there to get away, shoot some golf, etc. All of which and new entertainment possibilities be made possible in Zero G. The only concern I'd have about such a thing is radiation and stray space garbage smacking into it, but I think they could get that sorted out too.
Dream a little.
we've got another broken window, cruise over to the space K-Mart and get a space scooter full of whoever is hanging around to work on it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
He simply means he wishes it had been a closer race... not that anyone dropped dead trying. If Armadillo had launched their first yesterday, they'd still have lost the prize... it wouldn't mean that their second attempt had exploded, however. Think about that the next time you're in a hurry to reply.
Risk is probability * exposure.
The risk for an incident involving a car is much higher than that involving an airplane because most people's exposure to cars is far higher than airplanes. I interact with cars as a driver, passenger, or pedestrian every day. I might fly, as a passenger in an airplane, once or twice a year.
Yes, they are piggy backing on NASA.
But I guess that NASA developed a number of things.
BTW, I have done work for NASA and it will always remain one of my favorite entities. But NASA did not stand alone. They stood on the shoulders of other giants.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This statement would only make sense if you think the government should own your life. If, on the other hand, you believe individuals own their own lives, you'd be glad the government stayed out of the way.
Some other contenders:
* American Astronautics
* Acceleration Engineering
* American Advent
* ARCA
* Armadillo Aerospace
* Bristol Spaceplanes
* Canadian Arrow
* Da Vinci
* Discraft Corporation
* Fundamental Technology Systems
* High Altitude Research Corp.
* Interorbital Systems
* ILAT
* Lone Star Space Access
* Micro Space
* Pablo de León & Associates
* PanAero, Inc.
* Pioneer Rocketplane
* Mojave Aerospace Ventures, LLC.
* Space Transport Corporation
* Starchaser Industries LTD
* Suborbital Corporation
* TGV Rockets, Inc.
* Vanguard Spacecraft
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
[sigh] Everything private parties have so far done in space, the government did first. Look, I'm as enthusiastic about the prospect of being able to buy a ticket to the Moon for my 50th birthday as the next geek, but to say that the government is "keeping us from doing it right" when, in fact, the Rutan team built on decades of NASA experience is just absurd. As with most major enterprises, a combination of public and private efforts will get us much farther than either could on its own.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
[sigh] Everything private parties have so far done in space, the government did first. Look, I'm as enthusiastic about the prospect of being able to buy a ticket to the Moon for my 50th birthday as the next geek, but to say that the government is "keeping us from doing it right" when, in fact, the Rutan team built on decades of NASA experience is just absurd. As with most major enterprises, a combination of public and private efforts will get us much farther than either could on its own.
Walk before you crawl, padawan.
The difference is, this is a bottom-up approach to space travel, with much larger socio-economic implications. What's the incentive for the government to go to space? Exploration, a little research, mostly the "because it's there" argument. That doesn't generate much initiative. What's the incentive for a private company to ferry tourists to sub-orbit? $200,000. Each. As more people make the trip, the companies will get better at their craft, building more efficient, higher-performace vehicles. Pretty soon, people will be going to orbit for the same price they went to sub-orbit, and the price will be going down all the time. Cargo capacities will increase, and the cost-per-pound to high Earth orbit will decrease dramatically. At that point, it's economically viable for a large corporation to purchase vehicles that would allow them to grow near-perfect crystals in microgravity, for instance, to be used in optics or timepieces or jewelry. Hotels WILL be built in space. Industries will be born that we can't even imagine right now. Think about what the internet/home computing did as far as creating industries. No one in the 1960s would have even dreamed of the industries we have now. And most of it was due to a small company mass-producing a computer that fit on a table. Everything this private company did had already been done, by the government, and many other small companies followed suit. There were no computing advantages to making a computer fit on a table, since it was slower than the best room-sized computers of the day. There were only economic advantages.
The bottom line is that this is a window to getting thousands of people into space, and many more thousands working on ways to do it cheaply, efficiently, and safely. Once those pieces are in place, we will finally see the *real* space age. For a parallel, please research the rise of the desktop computer, the history of the automobile, and the entire airline industry.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
You mean the prize purse that was (initially) put up by the City of St. Louis, Missouri, USA?
Sometimes I think America's achievements are in the same category as the old saw about marriage...what's yours is yours and what's ours is yours.
Whatever, man. Obviously nothing good has ever, ever come out of the US, so your bias is totally justifiable.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!