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Private space flight attempt takes off Nestled beneath an alien-looking airplane, the SpaceShipOne rocket plane rose into the air Monday on a flight that could make it the first privately developed craft to go into outer space.
Test pilot Mike Melvill waved and gave a thumb's up to the crowd as SpaceShipOne and its White Knight carrier airplane rolled down the tarmac at the Mojave Airport. If Monday’s flight goes as planned, he will become the first astronaut to steer a nongovernmental spaceship into outer space. Thousands of spectators thronged to watch the White Knight, with SpaceShipOne mounted beneath, swoop down a runway and rise into the sky, after a wind-whipping night that sandblasted the overnight campers. "This is bigger than Kitty Hawk," said Tim Reeves, of Los Angeles. The 60-year-old arrived at 7:30 p.m. the night before from Los Angeles. "At Kitty Hawk they didn't have visions of 747s dancing in their heads. Here, everybody knows what this portends for private space flight." Another spectator had a simpler perspective. Vinnie Gamte, the 5-year-old son of one of the engineers on SpaceShipOne, said he came out to see "my daddy's rocket ship." The takeoff was just the first step in a procedure that has been tested over the past year: When the White Knight, piloted by Brian Binnie, nears an altitude of 50,000 feet, about an hour after takeoff, the pilots will seek clearance for the release of SpaceShipOne.
Bob Rice, operations director for the Mojave Airport, said it would be up to him to give the go-ahead. “And that’s the very moment we become a spaceport,” he told MSNBC.com. SpaceShipOne would decouple itself from the White Knight, then fire up its hybrid rocket engine, powered by a rubber compound and nitrous oxide. An 80-second burn would power the craft at more than three times the speed of sound, to an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers), the internationally recognized boundary of outer space. From that height, Melvill would be able to glimpse the blackness of space above the curvature of the earth. His trajectory would give him about three minutes of weightlessness. Then SpaceShipOne’s wings would fold into a high-drag configuration -– turning the craft into a self-stabilizing shuttlecock.
Melvill got a taste of the experience in May, when he flew the craft to a height of 40 miles (64 kilometers). “I’m hoping this will be an exact repetition, just a little higher, a little faster,” he told reporters on the eve of the flight. Aviation designer Burt Rutan, the project’s leader at Mojave-based Scaled Composites, told journalists he was comfortable with the risks associated with Monday’s flight. “I’m not staying up nights worrying about it,” he said. In the final stage of the 25-minute descent, SpaceShipOne would straighten its wings again and glide to a landing back at the MojaveAirport. The project is the result of years of work funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the world’s fifth-richest individual on Forbes magazine’s annual list with net worth of $21 billion. Allen said he has spent “in excess of $20 million” on SpaceShipOne. Monday’s test flight represents a step toward winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize, which would be awarded to the first team to send a spaceship carrying a pilot and the weight of two passengers to an altitude of 100 kilometers twice within two weeks.
This flight won’t qualify for the prize, because SpaceShipOne would be carrying only Melvill. But if Monday’s flight is successful, Rutan could announce a schedule for his X Prize attempts soon afterward. Then what? Rutan said Sunday that the technology behind SpaceShipOne could be scaled up for use on bigger spacecraft capable of bringing several tourists to the edge of space. “I believe within 10 to 15 years there will be affordable suborbital flights like the one you see today,” he said. He said the technology was jointly owned by Mojave Aerospace, a corporation that was set up with Allen. Rutan said he had a share in the corporation by virtue of his intellectual property, but “the majority value is the funding that Paul brought to it.” Allen said that once the X Prize is won, “that opens up a whole host of opportunities to do other things.” “We’ll be evaluating whether to have partnerships,” Allen said, “because obviously as you scale up the envelope, the costs go up correspondingly, too, so it becomes a much larger-scale effort.” Rutan then added: “One of our lessons learned from doing this program is that it is a very good idea to not reveal to the media what we’re doing until we have to, because if I had to do this even occasionally, we’d be a year behind.” |
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