I wonder if I will remember the moment SpaceShipOne lifted off the ground, strapped to the underbelly of her White Knight launch vehicle, as I have come to remember other important moments in history. My generation remembers other such events quite readily, the moment Reagan was shot, the instant the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded, the day that the Berlin Wall tumbled to the ground...

I can still see myself in my mind's eye, sitting in the living room in front of the television, giddy with excitement. Perhaps I was a little too exuberant as I tried to catch every aspect of the launch and successive landing on the TiVo so Danny could watch it when he came home from school.

... yes, I think I will remember it for a long time. The day that mankind left their governments, and our planet, behind them, as we reached out into space.

True, it was a business venture. It was personally funded by Paul Allen of Microsoft, and in the end it did not even cost that much compared to some of the other things we waste our money on. That does not diminish the flight for me one bit. (Actually, it makes me feel better about the money I spend on Microsoft products...) Perhaps it is my indefatigable inner romantic, but I like to think that we did this not to be profiteering, but for the spirit described by former President John F. Kennedy when he said:

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

--President John F. Kennedy

Minor Glitches in First Flight

It looks like SpaceShipOne had a few glitches in it's first 100km flight, resulting in a "Trajectory Excursion". According to Scaled Composites, the Burt Rutan company that built the SpaceShipOne, the primary pitch control gave out late in the boost phase. Luckily, Mike Melvill, Earth's latest astronaut, was able to bring a redundant system online to correct for the failure. The result was that the team fell short of their 110km mark, but still achieved the 100km necessary to be recognized as a true space flight.

Humanity Rocks.

Posted by Michael at June 27, 2004 11:37 AM