Most excellent news came out of California this morning: Scaled Composites has set June 21 as the launch date for the first official suborbital spaceflight of SpaceShipOne. They topped 40 miles in a test flight a month ago, which is effectively the edge of space. But this flight will take the spaceship above 63 miles in altitude, which is the threshhold for the $10 million X-Prize. NASA also considers the "official" boundary of space to be 50 miles, so whoever the pilot is will become the first private pilot to earn astronaut wings. (An interesting bit of trivia: Neil Armstrong earned astronaut's wings by piloting the X-15 above 50 miles long before he even joined NASA's astronaut corps.)
MSNBC has a pretty good history of SpaceShipOne and Scaled Composites online for further reading. If they really developed this entire system for $35 million or so, that's simply astounding. It could quite literally open space up to the general public, and make it affordable. Sure, SpaceShipOne is "only" suborbital, but I strongly suspect Scaled Composites could design a system with those capabilities for far less than the billions being bandied about by NASA...
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