Into Space!
(Following up on a piece mentioned back on June 2.) Tomorrow -- Monday, June 21st -- will see a manned space-shot by a civilian company.
Planned flight specifics: SpaceShipOne, carrying a single passenger, is set to begin its flight at 6:30 am PDT slung under a separate jet aircraft. At 50,000 ft it will be released, ignite its own engines, and with an 80-second burn of its engines achieve an altitude of at least 62 miles, the generally-accepted beginning point of "space", where the craft is scheduled to stay for 3 minutes - pilot in a "weightless" (more technically microgravity) condition - before returning to Earth in a glide. The take-off and landing points will be the same, on a runway in the Mojave Desert.
This is a run-up flight to this company's (Scaled Composites') bid for the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. The prize-winning flight will have to carry at least 3 people (apparently not the 2 erroneously mentioned in the primary article concerning tomorrow's flight -- I'm presuming the prize organization's website has it right, though I have seen the "2" reference often.) Barring any problems with tomorrow's flight the plan is for SpaceShipOne to attempt the two flights with the requisite 3-person payload within a few weeks. In order to win the prize the two flights will have to make use of the same ship and be completed within a 2-week span of each other.
While the $10 million prize is roughly one quarter of what's already been spent in getting SpaceShipOne this far, no one said that this was - at least in the short term - a profit-driven enterprise. Much of the focus thusfar has been on how a private company has seemingly been able to do so much with millions compared to the billions that NASA has expended on similar work.
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