It’s been a hell of a week, hasn’t it? What say we enter the weekend on a more positive note, something that speaks of human curiosity and wonder rather than bloodshed? Something like… a photograph that looks like it came from a science fiction movie, but was in fact taken from the Mojave Desert on April 3:

This was floating around the web a couple weeks ago, so my apologies if you’ve already seen it, but I’m just blown away by this. I’ll confess, I haven’t been nearly as enthusiastic about this vehicle — Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo — as I have with the other commercial spacecraft currently in development (or, in the case of the SpaceX Dragon, in operation!). While SpaceShipTwo is technically a spaceship — it’s designed to fly above the 62-mile altitude that’s commonly held to be the boundary of space — it’s incapable of reaching the ISS or achieving even low-Earth orbit. Its flightplans will consist, essentially, of big parabolic hops. And its missions will be little more than tourist larks for the wealthy, rather than anything really practical or that furthers human exploration or expansion into space. In my mind, it’s more of a toy than a real ship.

That said, though, it is a pretty machine, and we may learn much from it once it goes into operation. Also, it will keep manned spaceflight — of a sort — in the public eye, which I think is of vital importance. And of course, it will provide photo ops like this one, which is just spectacular. I think a big part of its appeal is that, to old-school nerds such as myself, it’s so familiar from our cinematic fantasies — a friend of mine said when he saw this photo, his first thought was of the Starship Enterprise hanging in the sky in the original Star Trek episode “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” and I immediately knew what he was talking about — but it’s real. The future is happening now.  And that’s pretty damn cool…

The photo’s source and a lot more information about SpaceShipTwo can be found here. Have a good weekend, everyone!