If you’ve paid even slight attention to the science news pages over the past two years, you already know all about SpaceShipOne. It is among the first manned space ships built by a private company to attempt to breach the ethereal boundary of space. It’s made of a unique lightweight carbon composite, gets hoisted 10 miles into the air by carrier plane White Knight before being dropped, and sports a single-stage rocket burning a hybrid propellant of rubber and laughing gas, which thrusts it into the planet’s atmosphere and treats its pilot to a few minutes of weightlessness.
Its chief designer, aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, proselytizes that its successful voyage will initiate several beginnings: a new private space program, an affordable space tourism industry, even a new space age, where investment and attention will flow to risk-taking entrepreneurs instead of cumbersome, bureaucratic organizations like NASA. “Clearly there is an enormous hunger to fly in space and not just dream about it,” Rutan said in a pre-flight press conference on Sunday with his company’s benefactor, billionaire Paul Allen.
Can their vision of a new private space industry be realized? It’s too early to tell. But thousands made a pilgrimage anyway to the parched California town of Mojave, the home to Rutan’s small aerospace company Scaled Composites, to witness purported history.
By 3:30 a.m. this morning, there were long lines of cars and trucks stretching down Route 58, waiting to get into the windswept Mojave airport, where SpaceShipOne would take off. Kern County sheriffs estimated unofficially that 11,000 people made the pilgrimage; scientists and engineers, families with excited upward-gazing children, space dreamers and history buffs. (And journalists. Nearly 600 of us showed up, from all over the world.) Hotel rooms were completely booked in tiny Mojave–population 4,000. “I didn’t get to see Charles Lindbergh do his thing, so I’m here to see this one,” said Dana McPeek, a self described computer whiz, whose family joined hundreds of others camping out in an RV in an airport parking lot.
We gathered at 4:00 a.m. to await the launch. Above us in the clear, pre-dawn sky, the tiny glinting speck of the orbiting international space station passed overhead, close to the horizon.
On the drive down from San Francisco, I had wondered if Americans even cared about space flight anymore. My traveling companion, Wired senior editor Adam Rogers, pointed out that the projections of the 1939 fairs in New York and San Francisco had all come true. We were already living in the future. And disasters with the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger have left Americans deeply cynical about NASA and promises of space exploration in our lifetime.
We met Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin at a cocktail party Sunday evening and asked him if American interest in space flight was declining. He thought it was, and that only the success of NASA’s twin Mars robots–the breathtaking images and scientific troves of data they’ve sent back– has stopped the flame from totally extinguishing. “It’s hard to tell how long the rovers can keep interest up,” he said. “Getting human beings involved generates real interest.”
Burt Rutan wants to re-ignite the flame. The famed aircraft designer, behind many modern innovations in aviation, conceived his first ideas for a manned space craft 9 years ago. He finalized detailed plans for SpaceShipOne in 1999, and lured more than $20 million in funding from Microsoft co-founder Allen in 2001. Rutan trained three of his test pilots to take the inaugural flight and recently made his choice, handing the controls over to Mike Melvill, a 63-year-old native of South Africa and a vice president at Scaled Composites. At 6:00 a.m., with the sun rising, Melvill climbed into his cockpit and SpaceShipOne rolled out onto the tarmac in the marsupial grip of its carrier plane White Knight. Thousands of VIPs, press and spectators jostled for a good view as the vehicles taxied by. The dragonfly-shaped aircraft took off over the wind farm on the Tehachapi Mountains into a brightening sky.
We waited an hour as the White Knight climbed to 10 miles, hauling its 18,000-pound cargo. At 7:45, the staffers at Mojave Airport directed us to stare into the eastern sky below the sun. We put our fists out to block the glare and saw it: White Knight was dropping SpaceShipOne and curving away. At 7:50, the barely visible speck that was SpaceShipOne suddenly chalked a bright white vertical line, past the sun and into the open sky. Melvill was burning his rocket engine and heading upwards at Mach 3. We stretched our necks, leaned back, and for 70 seconds followed his engine’s burning contrail of water and smoke into the atmosphere. The contrail disappeared when the world’s first civilian astronaut reached a height of more than 270,000 feet. He would coast for another 5,000 feet and reach a height of 328,491–62 miles, just barely where space officially begins. It was a spectacular sight.
About fifteen minutes later, at 8:15 a.m. SpaceShipOne glided in for a perfect landing and was tugged by a truck over to a beaming Burt Rutan and Paul Allen. Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin was among those who greeted the pilot and told him, “Welcome to the club.” Then Melvill recounted his experience to the crowd. “The white clouds over the L.A. basin looked like snow on the ground,” he said. “It was a mind-blowing experience. It was an absolutely awesome thing.” The sky grew dark and he could see to San Diego and up to Bishop, California. Melvill said at the apogee of his flight, during a brief period of weightlessness, he released a bag of M&Ms in his cockpit and watched them float before him in a rainbow of colors. “They spun around like little sparkly things,” he said.
Later, at a press conference, he would tell of a serious safety problem with the flight: a malfunction with the trim, the control that manipulates the wings. Melvill was able to quickly switch to a backup system, but veered 22 miles off course and ultimately didn’t climb as high as planned. But he still, technically, reached space. FAA official Patricia Grace Smith surprised the pilot by presenting him with the first pair of civilian astronaut wings, and a representative from the Guinness Book of World Records designated the achievement as the first ever privately-funded manned space flight.
The day was long and hot. But no one seemed to mind. Is it the beginning of a new space age? Who knows? Rutan says he’s working on other ships and has dropped hints of a third design, code named “346,” that he may be co-developing with Paul Allen. He has also said that he will attempt orbital flight at some point. And other space entrepreneurs are pursuing similar plans. Will they come to anything? Why make predictions when there’s an indisputable fact: it was a spectacular morning in the desert.
