Monday, October 4, 2004: SpaceShipOne has taken the "big prize", climbing beyond 62 and a half miles, carrying its pilot and extra weight equivalent to two adult passengers. Contest rules say had it to do it twice in the space of two weeks to win the $10-million dollar Ansari prize.
Unlike last week's run, when the craft rolled around its vertical axis several times before its thruster system was used to stabilize it at the edge of space, today's flight was apparently "nominal", as the space pros describe these things. The upshot is..privately operated and commercial space flight seems much more viable.
The following editorial was filed in June, when the first test flight was accomplished. What was said then stands today.
JS: Anyone who knows the history of aviation will recognize what is now happening: innovative genius is showing the way. Others will follow.
Within a few years of the Wright Brothers' pioneering leap in 1903, new and often better ideas emerged. Among the first of those was Glenn Curtiss' use of ailerons to supplant the Wright's wing-warping system. The Wrights hotly contested what they considered an infringement of their patent rights. But as we see when we look at our own wings today, innovation prevailed. There was more and the airplane grew.
Burt Rutan is the man who built the airplane that flew around the world on one tank of gas. He also pioneered in the use of composite materials..lightweight concoctions that are stronger than steel..in aircraft. Check any airliner
today and you'll find that composites are a major fabric of the wing. Rutan started out building kit-planes, small machines you could build in your garage..or could buy fully assembled. That was a long time ago, and many of those airplanes are still flying. The fact remains that when it comes to taking the next big step, Rutan is the man you expect to see out front, as is the case today. It's a fantastic achievement.
On the surface, Rutan's backers, led by Microsoft's Paul Allen, have couched this as a competition for the fabled X-prize, a 10-million dollar reward for anyone who can build a machine that will take a three person payload to sub-orbital space twice in two weeks. That's a gigantic proposition in itself, as NASA will tell you ruefully. The backers say they want to launch a space tourism industry to fly wealthy travelers up for a few minutes of sublime weightlessness. If that's all it is, it isn't worth it. Rutan's and Allen's expenses alone come to twice the amount of the prize. Like Charles Lindbergh, who flew to Paris for a 25-thousand dollar prize, the rewards don't pay the frieght. So that's not all it is.
What it is is a direction, if not a blueprint, for where to go from here.
One of NASA's biggest operational problems is not being able to get to space easily. It costs 25 times the price of Rutan's whole system just to fly a space shuttle one time. And once the shuttle has flown, it takes another three or four months' servicing to go out and fly it again. Costs to the users are tremendous. What NASA needs desperately to augment the shuttles is a way to get into space quickly ie: to the space station, come back, turn around and go out again..within days. The space agency has tried to build its own (taxi) system and, being government, has come up with things so elaborate that they have failed miserably. They are still trying.
Airlines salivate over the idea of being able to build a rocket plane that would take their passengers to earth orbit,
where they could be transported quickly to the other side of the world..two hours to Tokyo from New York, that sort of thing. Is Rutan's germ of an idea the way to go? Maybe not his system per se..but the concepts are right in there.
The long view is this: so far, space has been the enterprise of governments. In terms of exploration, it will continue that way because private industry can't foot the bill for something that does not pay back materially. If government finds something, say on the moon, that can be exploited, industry will find a way to get there. On the other hand, SpaceShipOne presents an opportunity to get the private individual and/or investor personally involved. And that's just as necessary now as it was in the early 1900s when aviation was getting started. But even then, government was the first buyer; the Wright Brothers' first big sale was to the US Army. The private individual didn't get involved much till World War 1 was over, and not in a really big way until Linderbergh made his Paris Flight. Maybe this is Burt Rutan's Paris.
But make no mistake: Rutan took old government systems for his model. Rutan's spaceship was hauled to launch altitude by a carrier plane. Remember that the famous X-15 rocksetship was dropped from the wing of a B52 to make its own stabs into sub-orbital space in the 50s and 60s. Chuck Yeager's Bell X-1 sped off from the belly of a B29 to break the "sound barrier." Burt Rutan, being Burt Rutan, built his own carrier plane, the "White Knight," using materials that he developed. But you get the picture.
I think this is terrific.
Go Burt.
Go.
