As much of the world looks back to July 20th, 1969, when a 38-year-old astronaut became the first person to stand on the moon, one must wonder if we will one day regard June 21, 2004 an equally seminal moment in the history of space exploration.
On that day in the Mojave Desert where so much aeronautic history has been made, a 63-year-old test pilot sat in a small rocket carried aloft by a jet. The whole world might not have been watching as it did when Armstrong made his great leap for mankind. But those who were saw the next chapter of the space race begin when Mike Melvill, sitting in SpaceShipOne, ignited a rocket at 47,000 feet and became the first civilian to fly into space.
That sunny day in June doesn’t carry the same significance as July 20th, 1969, and for good reason. The engineering accomplishment behind Apollo 11 is unmatched by anything in today’s private space race, even if the imagination involved is every bit as inspiring. But the flight Melvill piloted for 24 minutes as he shot 328,491 feet into the heavens marks the day space opened up for the rest of us.
Melvill didn’t bound across the lunar landscape or even orbit the earth. But he and the team at Scaled Composites (with some financial help help from Paul Allen) showed it was possible to enter the vastness of space and even enjoy a few moments of weightlessness without joining the elite crew of government astronauts and cosmonauts. Melvill repeated the accomplishment and shortly thereafter was joined in the civilian astronaut ranks by Brian Binnie, who flew SpaceShipOne on its third and final flight. Today, Burt Rutan, SpaceShipOne’s designer, and his team at Scaled Composites are busy developing the next phase of the new space race.
Backed by Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, they are putting the finishing touches on SpaceShipTwo. It is designed to carry six passengers into space. The first tickets will be expensive and "the rest of us" might not be truly applicable at this point. But tickets on the early airplanes that carried passengers around the country were also expensive, yet today a flight in an airliner can cost little more than a few tanks of gas for your car.
Of course to get those prices down to the rest of us, there must be a true space race, not a space time trial by a single entrant. When SpaceShipOne first flew, it was competing for the Ansari X-Prize. Twenty-six teams competed for the $10 million prize for the first outfit to complete two space flights within two weeks. Some had little chance of winning, but they all showed there is huge interest in private space flight. More than $1.5 billion has been spent on the private space race in the past five years.
Several ventures besides Virgin Galactic aim to carry us beyond Earth's atmosphere. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' company, Blue Origin is developing a launch vehicle not far from the big bookstore's headquarters in Seattle. PayPal founder Elon Musk's SpaceX has been distracted by the promise of NASA contracts to carry people and cargo to the International Space Station, well beyond the suborbital trips performed by SpaceShipOne. But the company still plans commercial space flights in the future.
More than a dozen private companies are actively working on private space vehicles. Tomorrow we'll take a closer look at several of them and see what chance the rest of us have to see the black sky of space.
Meanwhile, check out the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission on Wired Science.
Photo: Mike Massee / Scaled Composites
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