On top: my "Mojave Dreamer", something that I just drew somedayBelow from left to right: Burt Rutan and Sir Branson with SpaceShipTwo,
next a previously released version of the launch system, and far on the right there's Rutan's "Boomerang".
Think about it: what would you do if woke up one day and found some 200.000 Euros in your pocket? You may think that I’m nuts but, right after taking a cold shower (in order to make sure that I’m not dreaming!) I would immediately call Virgin Galactic in the UK! I’d phone them the soonest possible! I would buy myself a ticket for my own suborbital flight! All right, maybe my mum and dad would convince me to save some of that money… but most of it would be just for that flight… and they would understand it! They just know me too well! Forget about buying a home in
To anyone in love with air and space, and eager to take part of amazing adventures, a “ride up there” would be worth spending all that money and even more. Ask Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Anousheh Ansari and Charles Simonyi: they all have spent more than 20 million dollars in their own dream spaceflight… and I’m sure if they could come back in time… they would simply do it again! No regrets. At all!
On January 23rd 2008 Burt Rutan and Sir Richard Branson unveiled White Knight Two and SpaceShipTwo, and by doing so a moment we space geeks have been waiting for so long finally came true: for the first time since Sputnik, “Space Tourism” truly seems to be on the way of becoming a reality in the near future, and a new revolution in spaceflight might take place sooner than you think…
White Knight Two and SpaceShipTwo are together a revolutionary launch system that will carry six paying passengers into a suborbital flight. Up there, at some
SpaceShipTwo is the evolution of SpaceShipOne, which is a vehicle designed by Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites. SpaceShipOne won the X-Prize in 2004. The X-Prize was an inspiring competition in which many teams were tasked to reach space with a vehicle capable of carrying two paying passengers and a pilot, twice in a two-week period. The winning team, Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, got a 10 million-dollar prize for doing so, in the same very spirit that many decades ago moved Charles Lindberg to fly solo across the Atlantic from New York to Paris in 1927 (for a 25000-dollar prize!), an act of bravery that pushed the limits of aviation of its time and helped grow interest in intercontinental flight. Back then they had “The Lone Eagle” (that is Lindberg), a mighty small airplane named “The Spirit of St. Louis”, a courageous engineer named Donald Hall and aircraft builder "Ryan Aeronautical Company" of San Diego, California. In 2004 we had two great pilots, Brian Binie and Mike Melvill, great entrepreneurs such as Sir Richard Branson and Paul Allen supporting them, and visionary designer Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites in Mojave,
If you think the launch system looks weird… have a look at the picture far on the right: that’s “Boomerang”, another one of Rutan’s designs! Now that’s weird! And yet they say it flies smoothly, just like the wind itself! Do you wanna get even more scared? SpaceShipTwo is not even made of metal: just “fabric and glue”, some materials known as “composites”! Something closer to fibreglass rather than to metal… It has work in Burt Rutan’s flying inventions for decades, it has work perfectly with SpaceShipOne and I’m sure it’s gonna work even better in this new vehicle! Just fabric and glue… This is just too exciting, isn’t it?
Many people would ban the whole thing by saying that it’s just another rich people’s leisure (“expect to see Paris Hilton or Lindsey Lohan up there soon…” Holly Shi@#!!!!), and that the whole thing is just too expensive for ordinary guys (like me). Well, it is, but if you read a little bit of history you’ll see that so many things we have for granted nowadays and can buy without that much of an effort, from cool bicycles, cellphones, TVs, stereos, and Laptop PCs to a car or even an ultralight airplane, were all things that once were reachable just by the richest people. Some of these inventions became reachable in just a few decades to most of us and currently many more companies prepare to enter the spacetourism business, so we can expect prices to go downwards… in time. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to save that much money in my lifetime but I’m sure the whole thing will be reachable to many more people, maybe even my children and grandchildren someday. The whole thing, in the words of Sir Branson “can lead to orbital travel, it can lead to the most incredible kinds of hotels in space, it can lead to small little spaceships going around the moon and being able to view the moon from a 100 or
Thank God, while there are so many people trying to ruin the world (e.g. Bush, Mastela, Berlusconi, among others…) there are some others who try to make it a better place. In a time when youngsters are getting more and more lazy, in which interest in science and technology drops, in which just too many entrepreneurs prefer to complain rather than to improve and compete, in which everything is either too difficult or even impossible to accomplish… there come people like Burt Rutan, his team at Scaled Composites and entrepreneurs like Sir Branson who show us that it is possible to dream, that there’s a price in blood, sweat and tears to pay, and even the risk of not accomplishing it at all… but that you‘ve got to try! Whatever it is that make us a different species in this planet, it’s sure about our capability to risk, try new things, invent. Let’s pay attention to the future events at Virgin Galactic and that dusty place called Mojave, in
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