"SpaceShipOne:GovernmentZero!"

Scaled Composites Press-Release

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Pilot Michael Mevill stands atop the plane in which he became the first non-government-funded astronaut. He's holding a sign given to him by Arizona Libertarian and WLA Activist Ernest Hancock: "SpaceShipOne - GovernmentZero." (WLA photo)

The infamous sign as mentioned in: (Nature) (Tech News World) (Popular Science) (LP News)

Private flight ends government monopoly on space travel

(source)

They've done it: A privately funded rocket plane on June 21 managed to escape the earth's atmosphere by flying 62.5 miles from the earth's surface -- that's 330,000 feet, straight up -- thus becoming the first manned craft to do so without government funding.

Former Libertarian presidential candidate Barry Hess and talk radio host Ernest Hancock of Arizona were among the Libertarians observing the launch in Mojave, California -- which Hancock called "an enormous, historic event" with distinctly Libertarian overtones.

"This is a whole new era in travel," he said. "These people are sending a pilot -- an astronaut -- into space with zero government involvement. It's phenomenal. We're talking about privately funded space travel."

The new space vehicle, which was dubbed SpaceShipOne by investor Paul G. Allen and the design team headed by aviation legend Burt Rutan, will eventually take on a new goal: Winning the Ansari X Prize of $10 million that has been promised to the first team that can send a reusable space craft with three people into orbit twice in two weeks.

It's not about the money. As founder and chairman of Vulcan Inc., Allen doesn't need the money. Besides, he's spending $20 million on his private space program, so winning the X Prize wouldn't even pay him back.

Rather, the goal is to make space travel affordable -- and to prove that government involvement isn't necessary for space travel.

As the X Prize mission statement says: "We believe that spaceflight should be open to all -- not just an elite cadre of government employees or the ultra-rich. We believe that commercial forces will bring spaceflight into a publicly affordable range. We will use our best efforts to achieve this goal."

The Libertarian Party's presidential candidate Michael Badnarik couldn't be at the launch because of schedule conflicts, but he agrees with many other Libertarians that the SpaceShipOne project shows that government involvement hurts private enterprise.

"We didn't have commercial space flight until today because of government interference," Badnarik said. "From harassing high-power rocketry enthusiasts, to trying to stop Dennis Tito's private flight on a Russian rocket, jealous government bureaucrats have stifled innovation in space.

"SpaceShipOne's launch shows what private enterprise can do when government gets out of the way."

The craft is equipped with three seats and is designed to carry a pilot and two passengers, so Scaled Composites (Burt Rutan's team) has a great head start on some of the other 26 groups trying to be first to orbit the earth.

Shortly after the craft landed, Rutan reportedly handed pilot Michael Mevill a sign that Ernest Hancock had given him, reading "SpaceShipOne - Government Zero."

Yes, people are keeping score.

"Since Yuri Gagarin and Al Shepard's epic flights in 1961, all space missions have been flown only under large, expensive government efforts," Rutan said before the space attempt.

"By contrast, our program involves a few dedicated individuals who are focused entirely on making spaceflight affordable. Without the entrepreneur approach, space access would continue to be out of reach for ordinary citizens. The SpaceShipOne flights will change all that and encourage others to usher in a new, low-cost era in space travel."

Rutan predicted that suborbital space tourism could become routine and affordable within the next 15 years, as the free market drives what he called "a space age for all of us."

SpaceShipOne scrapes into history
Record breaker sears across desert sky.
22 June 2004
HELEN PEARSON
(source)

There are many ways to celebrate your debut in space. For Mike Melvill, pilot of SpaceShipOne, it was to pop open a bag of multicoloured sweets and watch them dance. "It was absolutely amazing ... those M&Ms were just going around," he said minutes later, on the baking black runway in the California desert.

Melvill shot into space history early on Monday morning when he became the first pilot to top 100 kilometres (3238,000 feet), and earn his astronaut credentials, in a privately financed rocket. Tens of thousands of eyes, including those of SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan and financial backer Paul Allen, were glued to the contrail as it streaked towards the fringes of space.

Not everything went as planned. The rocket crested at around 120 metres over the official boundary of suborbital space (a success, but far lower than Rutan had hoped for) and strayed over 30 kilometres off course when it re-entered the atmosphere, a problem attributed to a failure in one of the flight control systems. The ship also touched down with a dent in its tail.

A tannoy showered spectators with words such as "historic", "momentous" and "record-breaking" throughout the dawn air show. Space enthusiasts hope that the success will kick-start a space age of private travel.

But there are many obstacles to overcome before engineers can produce a space bus that even a luxury traveller can afford to jump on. Engineers need to work on a reliable, re-usable, and affordable vehicle that can reach orbit around the Earth, says Jim Benson, founder of space technology company SpaceDev, based in Poway, California. "What we need to strive for now is make it even simpler," he says.

Space mania

The small town of Mojave, California, has a history of test flights and is littered with retired airliners and their innards. It perches in the high desert north of Los Angeles amid mountains dotted with wind turbines and contorted Joshua trees.

SpaceShipOne brought a wave of space mania like Mojave has never seen before. The night before the event, spectators' trucks began trundling into town and rumours spread of desert raves and hangar parties. "There's absolutely nothing else to do in Mojave," joked Rutan the day before.

By 3.30 next morning, a trail of headlights was snaking into the airport entrance and 500 or so members of the media jostled for space on the runway's edge. Shortly after the last stars were quenched and sunrise had painted the sky pink, the fierce desert wind dropped and the all clear was sounded.

Fastened to the stomach of a futuristic carrier aeroplane, SpaceShipOne cruised into the sky at 6.30am, accompanied by two chase planes. After circling upwards until they were glistening specks, SpaceShipOne dropped free and fired its own rockets towards the ground, pumping out a vertical contrail as it rose into the sky.Down below, several minutes of suspense followed, as viewers waited for word that the rocket had reached its goal. Only as SpaceShipOne glided down towards the runway did news come through that it had grazed space: "It's a done deal," sounded the tannoy.

On firm groundPilot Mike Melvill emerged from the rocket in front of a bank of photographers to hug Allen and Rutan.

He described how he saw the curve of the earth, felt huge g-forces and spent three minutes weightless. "It was almost a religious experience," he said.

As he perched on the rocket's spine for a lap of honour, Melvill plucked a sign from the crowd. It read "SpaceShipOne, One, Government, Zero", referring to the relatively low cost of the flight, at around $20 million, compared with the lavish budgets of government projects.

Rutan says the team will analyse the flight data in detail and patch up the ship before announcing an attempt on the X-prize, the $10-million jackpot for the first private, piloted aircraft to top 100 kilometres carrying the weight of three people and repeat the feat within two weeks.

To maintain motivation and public attention, the X prize foundation plans to award annual cash prizes for records broken in altitude and passenger numbers. "Some will probably drop out, but the most serious efforts will not," predicts Elon Musk of SpaceX in El Segundo, California, which makes orbital rockets.

© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Private Flight Touches Beginnings of Space

By John Schwartz
06/22/04 11:29 AM PT
(source)

A veteran civilian test pilot Monday became the first human to reach space in a privately developed mission, guiding a tiny rocket ship more than 60 miles above California in a flight with several white-knuckle moments.

In front of thousands of spectators and a teeming press corps, the squid-shaped craft, SpaceShipOne, was lifted into the atmosphere shortly after 6:30 a.m., attached to the belly of a sleek plane called the White Knight.

When the plane reached an altitude of around 50,000 feet, it dropped the smaller craft, and its pilot, Michael W. Melvill, started the rocket that took him up nearly 300,000 feet more, to the beginnings of space. He then brought SpaceShipOne back to Earth as a glider, touching down at 8:15.
When Melvill, 63, emerged, he climbed atop the spaceship, spread his arms and gave a primal holler: "Yeeeeeeee-haaah!"

Both craft were designed by Burt Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites, with the help of the Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) billionaire Paul G. Allen, who said he had put more than $20 million into the project.

"The flight today opens a new chapter in history, making space access within the reach of ordinary citizens," said Patti Grace Smith, the associate administrator for commercial space transportation for the Federal Aviation Administration . Smith presented Melvill with astronaut wings after the flight.

Melvill earned those wings with some tense moments. During the rocket-fired ascent, he and Rutan recounted in a news conference, SpaceShipOne suddenly rolled 90 degrees to the left.

Melvill quickly made a correction, rolling the plane 90 degrees to the right, but then found that his trim controls, which are supposed to help control lift and drag, had a malfunctioning motor. He switched quickly to backup controls, stabilized the errant trim system and left it alone until he reached the ground again.

"I was afraid to touch it," Melvill said.

The trim problem left the plane some 20 miles off-course, and changed the angle of flight so that it reached only 328,491 feet. The team had been aiming for 360,000 feet.

Nine Years in the Making

Rutan called the malfunction "the most serious safety problem we have encountered" in the nine years it took to create and launch SpaceShipOne.
Melvill also said that, during ascent, he had heard a bang, which was apparently caused by a cover over the tail nozzle that buckled during the flight.

"I was pretty scared," he said. But Rutan said later that the problem had had little, if any, effect on the flight.
Until Monday, the only travelers to reach the imaginary line between Earth's atmosphere and suborbital space have been aboard ships paid for and controlled by governments.

Step Toward Prize

The flight Monday is a major step along the way for the Rutan team to being able to claim the Ansari X Prize, an international competition to launch people into space without government assistance.

The competition requires contestants to fly three people to an altitude of about 62 miles and then to repeat the flight with the same craft within two weeks.

Rutan had invited the public to see Monday's event, and people came by the thousands. A makeshift trailer park held an all-night party, and cars were streaming toward Mojave Airport at 4 a.m.

Even Rutan's competitors cheered him on. Geoff Sheerin, whose Canadian Arrow team has a spaceship with a sleek, Buck-Rogers-with-a-Maple-Leaf design, said all sides want to see a team begin the age of private sector human spaceflight. "This is a fantastic day for this industry," Sheerin said Monday.

The Space Business

Congratulations also came from higher above the Earth. "We're all in the space business together," said Lt. Col. Edward Mike Fincke, on the International Space Station.

Still, the flight Monday is a long way from the heights that NASA astronauts and cosmonauts reach on a regular basis; suborbital space was a brief steppingstone 40 years ago on the way to orbit and the moon. The International Space Station hovers some 240 miles above the Earth.

To Rutan, the idea that private enterprises might someday send private citizens into space is compelling -- and even more so since the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has grown so expensive and bureaucratic that he says it cannot be counted on to do the job.

That type of sentiment was popular in the crowd. One of the spectators handed Rutan a sign that read: SpaceShipOne, GovernmentZero.

SPACESHIPONE SOARS

Rutan-designed vehicle makes history with first privately funded spaceflight--but not without glitches.

by Bill Sweetman and Eric Adams

(source)

MOJAVE, CALIF., June 21, 2004--Burt Rutan's revolutionary SpaceShipOne flew into space Monday morning, becoming the world's only successful privately funded space vehicle and making what could be the initial major step toward a viable space tourism industry. But the flight was marred by a potentially lethal control failure that is likely to delay Rutan's attempt to win the Ansari X-Prize for the first demonstration of a reusable, three-passenger spacecraft.

The suborbital flight began at 6:47 a.m. PDT when SpaceShipOne and its mothership, White Knight, took off from Mojave Airport, where thousands of spectators and media gathered to watch the event. Mike Melvill, 63, flew SpaceShipOne while Brian Binnie piloted White Knight--both are test pilots for Scaled Composites, Rutan's company. (Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen funded the project through his company, Vulcan, investing around $20 million into Rutan's radical design.)

The two aircraft climbed to 50,000 feet, where SpaceShipOne separated from White Knight. At 7:50 a.m., Melvill ignited SpaceShipOne's hybrid rocket motor, which was fueled by 600 pounds of rubber and 3,000 pounds of nitrous oxide. The vehicle accelerated straight up during the 80-second engine burn, reaching almost Mach 3.

Near the end of the climb, one of the electrical actuators that controls the craft in pitch and roll apparently failed. When Melvill called for a pitch maneuver that should have moved the left and right wing controls, only one of them moved, and SpaceShipOne rolled to the left, skidding 20 miles off course in seconds. "I really thought I had a big problem," Melvill said after the flight. But the vehicle left the atmosphere at that point--and with no air, the position of the control surface no longer mattered, and Melvill was able to stabilize it with pneumatic jet thrusters and activate a back-up trim system. "If I hadn't popped out of the atmosphere at that moment, it would have been all over," Melvill said.

The failure and the course deviation caused the flight to miss its target altitude of 360,000 feet, but navigation data showed that SpaceShipOne reached 328,491 feet, a few hundred feet above the 62.5-mile altitude that defines space. During his three minutes of weightlessness, Melvill admired the view ("absolutely awesome," he enthused. "I saw all the way from San Diego to Bishop [Calif.]") and floated M&Ms around the cabin.

After reaching his maximum altitude, Melvill switched SpaceShipOne to its feathered-wing configuration, in which the spacecraft's wings pivot upward to permit the vehicle to re-enter the atmosphere in a highly stable shuttlecocklike configuration. Melvill described the feathered re-entry as loud but otherwise a "non-event," and actually more stable during the supersonic, Mach 3 part of the re-entry than in subsonic flight. Rutan cites the feathered re-entry as a major achievement, because it allows a vehicle to re-enter the atmosphere with a simple control system.

After re-entry, Melvill flipped the wing back into its normal position and glided the small vehicle to a gentle touchdown at Mojave. Now officially an astronaut, Melvill described the flight as "mind-blowing," providing a glimpse as to what the experience might be like for passengers who take similar flights in the future.

The control problem may affect Rutan's X-Prize attempt. To win the prize, SpaceShipOne will have to fly above 100 kilometers twice in two weeks, with two passengers or equivalent ballast. Rutan had hoped that the vehicle's next flight would be its first prize flight, but that decision will wait. "There's no way we'll fly again without knowing the cause and knowing that we've fixed it," he said.

Monday's flight will remain the true historic achievement, given the total absence of government funding in the project. Indeed, as SpaceShipOne was being towed back to the hangar, Melvill sat on top of the fuselage holding a sign that read "SpaceShipOne, Government Zero."

After winning the X-Prize, Rutan will quickly move on to other challenges. During press conferences leading up to Monday's flights, he dropped hints about "going to orbit sooner than you think," an apparent allusion to the Tier 3 orbital space-vehicle program that he is reportedly involved in. The SpaceShipOne program is known as Tier 1, and Tier 2 would probably be a tour-bus-like version of the same concept, a vehicle capable of carrying up to 10 passengers on suborbital space flights. Under his contract with Allen, Rutan is required to deliver data on how much such a vehicle would cost to build and fly. Mojave Aerospace--a new company jointly owned by Allen and Rutan and disclosed this week--will own the rights to SpaceShipOne technology and would oversee future franchising and commercialization efforts for the system. Details will remain secret, said the cagey Rutan, "until we're ready to push something out of the door."

SCALED COMPOSITES PRESS RELEASE
21 June 2004
For Immediate Release

SpaceShipOne Makes History: First Private Manned Mission to Space

The world witnessed the dawn of a new space age today, as investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen and Scaled Composites launched the first private manned vehicle beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. The successful launch demonstrated that the final frontier is now open to private enterprise.

Under the command of test pilot Mike Melvill, SpaceShipOne reached a record breaking altitude of 328,491 feet (approximately 62 miles or 100 km), making Melvill the first civilian to fly a spaceship out of the atmosphere and the first private pilot to earn astronaut wings.

This flight begins an exciting new era in space travel,” said Paul G. Allen, sole sponsor in the SpaceShipOne program. “Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites are part of a new generation of explorers who are sparking the imagination of a huge number of people worldwide and ushering in the birth of a new industry of privately funded manned space flight.”

The historic flight also marks the first time an aerospace program has successfully completed a manned mission without government sponsorship. “Today’s flight marks a critical turning point in the history of aerospace,” said Scaled Composites founder and CEO Burt Rutan. “ We have redefined space travel as we know it.”

“Our success proves without question that manned space flight does not require mammoth government expenditures,” Rutan declared. “It can be done by a small company operating with limited resources and a few dozen dedicated employees.”

A large crowd watched the momentous flight live from the grounds of the Mojave Airport, joining millions of others around the world who tuned in by television, radio, and the internet. Dignitaries attending the event included U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher, the Commanding Officer of Edwards Air Force Base, General Pearson and the China Lake Naval Air Warfare Center, Admiral Venlet; former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and Konrad Dannenberg, one of Werner Von Braun’s lead scientists on this country’s original space development effort. Hundreds of media representatives were also on hand to record history in the making.

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