PRIVATE GROUP ATTEMPTS MANNED SPACE FLIGHT (6-2004)

Talk about your ultimate thrill ride. Later this month a 
privately-built rocket plane will attempt to be the first 
non-government flight to make it into space with a pilot 
aboard.

Dubbed SpaceShipOne, the craft will be carried aloft by a 
specially designed jet aircraft and then dropped into a 
glide at an altitude of about 50,000 feet. The pilot will 
then fire the rocket motor and pull up into a vertical 
climb. 

Following an 80-second rocket firing that will accelerate 
the craft to Mach 3, it will then coast up to the target 
altitude before falling back to Earth. The pilot will 
experience weightlessness for more than three minutes. It 
will take at least 15 minutes to glide back to Earth.

It will be a suborbital flight, because the space craft 
will not attain a fast enough velocity to go into orbit. 
But it might earn its builder, Burt Rutan, and his sponsors 
$10 million.

The Ansari X Prize will go to the first private group to 
build a reusable rocket that will carry three people on a 
suborbital flight, return them safely to Earth, and then 
repeat the flight in the same vehicle within a period of 
two weeks.

Last month, SpaceShipOne climbed to 40 miles before 
returning to Earth. This month’s launch will attempt to 
reach 62 miles, high enough to be out of Earth’s 
atmosphere.

The government has been sending rockets and people into 
space for more than 40 years. Thus far, no private company 
has done so, mostly due to the high cost of going into 
space.

But using reusable rocket planes instead of expendable 
booster rockets has held the promise of lower costs and 
made it possible for private groups to attempt a trip into 
space. Ironically, rocket planes that could go into space 
were designed and test-piloted in the early ‘60s before the 
government finally decided on using expendable booster 
rockets.

SpaceShipOne is funded by Microsoft’s co-founder Paul 
Allen. He said the vehicle demonstrates that significant 
increases in commercial space technology can come from only 
modest increases in private funding. He did not, however, 
disclose how much it was costing.

There have been prior scattered attempts in the private 
sector to launch a vehicle into space, but none as 
ambitious as the SpaceShipOne project, because it is a 
manned vehicle. SpaceShipOne is competing with other 
organizations to win the Ansari X Prize.

It is a healthy competition. The private sector has been 
content to let the NASA be the sole agency to send people 
into space for decades. The time has finally come for 
private organizations to start sending manned vehicles into 
space for commercial purposes.

The Ansari X Prize will go a long way in promoting more 
research and development by whatever group wins it. Private 
companies can then start competing with NASA in the manned 
spaceflight arena. 

NASA can then concentrate on the big projects, such as 
sending people back to the moon and to Mars. The frontier-
building projects are what NASA does best. Besides, they 
are far too costly for private industry at the present 
time.

But for suborbital and low-orbital manned space flights, 
privately-funded vehicles may be the rule, rather than the 
exception, in the future. The company that succeeds first 
will gain a strong foothold in what will likely be the 
growth industry of the future.