Jun212004

Going Boldly…

I’m posting this fairly late, so the people who would be interested in this story probably already know about it. If, however, you haven’t seen the news, this has been a historic day for human spaceflight.

Early this morning, SpaceShipOne, the plucky little rocket plane I recently wrote about, dropped away from its mother ship, ignited its onboard motor, and arrowed upward to an altitude of 62 miles, becoming the first manned, non-governmental vehicle to reach outer space.


This is major, folks. Today was the moment that (relatively) ordinary people began to reach for the stars. If the Apollo missions were like Lewis and Clark’s tentative venture into the uncharted wilderness, this flight was like the first few minutes of the Oklahoma land rush. Not as ambitious as that preliminary exploration, not a bold thrust to the very limits of our abilities, but rather the beginning of a steady, inevitable outward expansion.

I’m not naive enough to think that this expansion will immediately follow today’s flight. SpaceShipOne could be nothing more than a one-time novelty. But I doubt it. Even if this vehicle never flies again, even if it takes decades for other civilian flights to follow, SpaceShipOne has served its purpose as a proof-of-concept vehicle. The ship’s designer, Burt Rutan, has demonstrated that civilian organizations really can design, finance, build and operate a spacecraft without any help from NASA and its bureaucracy. I feel proud, excited and hopeful, exactly the way I did twenty-four years ago when I stayed home from school to watch the first launch of space shuttle Columbia. Even with the on-going threats of terrorism, climate change, and economic turmoil, the future looks bright, my friends…

If you want more information about SpaceShipOne, follow these links:

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