First Fully Commercial Space Flight

On September 29, 2004, SpaceShipOne, created by Scaled Composites, successfully completed a manned flight to an altitude of 358,000 feet, making its pilot, Mike Melvill, the first commercial pilot ever to gain FAA Astronaut wings.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/0...e.attempt.cnn/

I saw the cool program History channel ran on it last night as well, and it included the ship's designer's dreams of a publicly accessable space station, and colonization of the planets. Pretty interesting stuff! Incidentally, the ship's hull is made entirely of fabric and polymer hardener. It uses a very unique design to allow for braking during reentry called 'the feather'.

Yesterday SpaceShipOne won the 10 million dollar Ansari X prize yesterday, after completing its second flight into space.

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,26...w=wn_tophead_8

Perhaps we'll soon see the benefits of this.

[edit] After reading through the new article at wired, I found a couple of glaring fact errors - the original pilot won his Astronaut wings on the Sept 24 flight, not back in june like wired reported, (I used the CNN article and History Channel program against their one article) and there's an altitude discrepancy as well, although they might have flown it to a lower altitude this time around... [/edit]

I admit I did not think the long standing prize money would be achieved in my life time. This is a major accomplishment. On par with other great scientific/adventure achievments. I always argued the true benefit and significance of space exploration and scientific acheivement would come when private individuals took to space.

Which person running for president happens to share my desire to push exploration beyond our atmospher? ;)

It’s great to see some competition from the private sector, maybe this will give NASA and other world space agency’s the shot in the arm that they need. Since the last shuttle accident I think a lot of people have lost faith in NASA and what they are trying to do.

Hopefully this new achievement will get the publics interest back. For the last few years a shuttle launch has barely gotten a 60 second fluff spot on the news. We shall see.

Quote:

---

Originally posted here by RoadClosed
I admit I did not think the long standing prize money would be achieved in my life time. This is a major accomplishment. On par with other great scientific/adventure achievments. I always argued the true benefit and significance of space exploration and scientific acheivement would come when private individuals took to space.

Which person running for president happens to share my desire to push exploration beyond our atmospher?

---

Now I think that the private sector doesn't have the wherewithal for deep space achievements, merely because of the payout. I'm thinking they will have something close to a bigger Mir space station in orbit maybe before the time Paul Allen, Bill Gates and "Monkey Boy" are dead? But man the risk is high for operational damage and personnel casualties. No joke, I'll put money on this any day of the week. We will see pilots and "tourist" in a complete burn out, incinerated coming into the atmosphere because of equipment failure.

Reasoning behind my guess and NASA's guess is cost cutting, in the research and development of these "cheap shuttles". Hell, you saw, we all saw the troubles with the "feather actuator" and his bearing equipment.

I'd rather pay for a ride in a Russian Mig "Travel at more than twice the speed of sound, to over 80,000 feet above the Earth.

Join those few free spirits that have already experienced this journey to the edge of space. At 70,000ft into the stratosphere, about 20miles above the ground the curve of the earth comes dramatically into view.

In the cockpit of a Russian MiG-25 military fighter sitting on some 50,000 pounds of thrust your aboard the fastest combat aircraft in the world.

The MiG-25 is a high altitude interceptor originally built to counteract the United States Blackbird which was the pride of the USAF and holds several world records for speed and altitude."