Into the Wild Black Yonder

In case you missed it, the Scaled Composites private suborbital space program, the brainchild of legendary aviation pioneer Burt Rutan and the beneficiary of Paul Allen's wealth, soared into history on June 21. For the first time ever, a privately funded manned vehicle successfully flew into space. Thanks to some in-flight anomalies, pilot Mike Melvill only just crossed the official international boundary line into space (situated rather arbitrarily at 100 kilometers, the boundary being originally specified for the purpose of protecting aviation records from being broken by spacecraft), but still--he made it. http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/i...

SpaceShipOne did not win the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. To do that, a vehicle must make two flights within two weeks, each time carrying three people or a pilot and the weight of two passengers. SpaceShipOne is not likely to quickly wrap up the Prize, either, since the aforementioned anomalies need to be decisively fixed before another flight is attempted. Spontaneous ninety-degree rolls left and right and three-second losses of control actuation are not the sort of things to make the mind rest easy, and although they are one of the major reasons test pilots are handsomely paid, even test pilots draw the line somewhere. http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/06/29...

But make no mistake. Every development program runs into problems, and people like Rutan and his top-notch folks at Scaled Composites are not the types to throw their hands up. They'll get everything ironed out, and they'll keep on trucking. And whatever else happens, SpaceShipOne will always be the first private manned spacecraft.

Now we know where that silly name came from. I bet they were anticipating this extraordinary achievement.

There are still a variety of folks vying for the X-Prize, and while SpaceShipOne is undoubtedly the frontrunner, they aren't an easy favorite. At least two other teams, the Canadian Arrow and the da Vinci Project, are in respectably advanced positions that could stand to give them the win. Incidentally, the Canadian Arrow team is also talking up a potential new extreme sport: "spacediving". I've only just taken up skydiving myself, but I think the idea of jumping out of a suborbital spacecraft, wearing an appropriate suit of course, sounds like it might be a lot of crazy, crazy fun.

SpaceShipOne is essentially a rocket-propelled glider, rather like the Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier. In fact, like the X-1, SpaceShipOne is also taken aloft by a carrier aircraft and released. Consequently, while SpaceShipOne looks like an excellent suborbital system, and could make a big contribution to suborbital tourism whether it wins the X-Prize or not, it isn't really appropriate for scaling up to orbital applications. Elon Musk of SpaceX, which is developing a family of reusable, low-cost commercial rockets, made this very observation in Aviation Week, while still offering sincere admiration for the accomplishment. http://www.hobbyspace.com/Links/RLVNews.... It's nothing against SpaceShipOne; it's just a matter of architecture. The specific impulse and the mass fraction required to reach orbit are much more exacting than for suborbital flight, and system architectures like that of SpaceShipOne just don't seem to fit the bill for orbital use. But, Burt Rutan is still thinking big, and has openly said he has orbital plans on his mind. We'll see what he comes up with next.

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