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June 22, 2004
Ground Control to Major Tom
Yesterday was an exciting day in the world of aviation and space travel. For the first time, we've had a civilian pilot reach the outer limits of space. SpaceShip One, built by Scaled Composites reached the space barrier by 408 ft, while it's pilot received the first ever pair of pilot wings for civilian space travel. I believe that SSO took a mere 20 million USD to build, a very small amount of money by todays standards. Looking at the whole, it's taken almost 50 years, but space travel is finally coming down in cost. Very cool, very exciting. Feels like the pioneer days of aviation. Does this make Mike Melvill the Charles Lindbergh of our day? In any case, the Ansari XPrize is now the project to be watched.
Listening to some commentary on the whole event via NPR (how often do I do that?), I got to hear one man claiming that this was just awful for the airlines, travel, and space flight itself. In a few ways he is correct. The feat accomplished by SpaceShip One is really nothing significant in the overall of space flight. After all, NASA did have the X-Plane series of flights in the mid-1940s accomplishing the same feats. The fact that this project is also steering interest away from manned flights to Mars is also of concern, but not a major downfall of the project. Beyond the Mars rovers, there really hasn't been a lot of interest in the space program here in the US, slowly losing it's hold over the imagination of the American public. For the first time in a long time, there seems to be a genuine interest in space flight from those who can be considered regular everyday people. Beyond that, the PR value of these flights is just amazing, and will hopefully help get more funding through for a manned mission to Mars.
Posted by Dan at June 22, 2004 10:44 AM