- A piloted rocket plane has blasted through the earth's
atmosphere becoming the first privately funded vehicle to reach the edge
of space.
-
- Manned by Mike Melvill, a 62-year-old test pilot, the
teardrop-shaped rocket made a 55 second climb to 211,400ft (40 miles) before
free-falling to a near perfect landing at Mojave airport, about 80 miles
north of Los Angeles in California.
-
- SpaceShipOne, the brainchild of Burt Rutan, the American
designer, was lofted into launch position by its a spider-like mother plane,
White Night, inside a smaller winged rocket attached to its belly. It then
fell for a few seconds before the engines were ignited, lurching it forward.
The craft made the longest such ascent by a private manned rocket - before
shutting off the engine. It then continued upward for a few seconds, propelled
by its own momentum.
-
- Specially designed vertical stabilisers kept the vehicle
upright as it fell, speeding across the sky at more than twice the speed
of sound, also a first for a private endeavour. Describing the view from
his window on a mission previously completed only by astronauts and military
test pilots, Melvin said: "Watching the blue sky go completely black
was the highlight of my career." Mr Rutan, renowned as a pioneer in
the aerospace industry, has built numerous aircraft, including Voyager,
which made the first nonstop flight around the world in 1986 without refuelling.
-
- Previously only two private individuals have managed
to reach space: Santa Monica businessman Dennis Tito and South African
Mark Shuttleworth, each paying $20m (£12m) to ride in a Russian-built
Soyuz.
-
- Mr Rutan and others are hoping to win the X Prize - a
$10m award to the first team that launches a piloted privately funded spaceship
able to carry three people 100km (62.5 miles) into the atmosphere and return
safely. The team must repeat the launch with the same ship within two weeks.
They want to open the way for commercial spaceflights in which the public
could get a round-trip space fare for about $100,000 by 2020.
-
- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=521429
|
