6/25/2004 » Tech

On Monday, Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne became the first private craft to reach space. I find this verrry romantic. Tech-romantic, that is. It’s not just the X Prize, it’s also the X Games, the gritty, white-knuckled version of a space launch. You’re popping a cork off-planet, but you’re sitting inside the cork.

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a launch contrail start from mid-sky and go vertical. You lie in a cramped little hole, riding a column of violence at three times sound speed, eyeballs flattening, an incomprehensible roar drowning thought. Two red lights begin blinking, you hear a most unwelcome explosion, your heart leaps and you know you’re going to die. Then, silence. You coast through a golden arc like a weightless fleck of spittle, California a nictating eye below, your spilled chocolate candies floating like candlelight in wine. Now you’re completely unpowered and begin dropping down, down, down like a crippled bird of prey.

SpaceShipOne was travelling "faster than an M-16 rifle bullet," Rutan said, about around 2400 km/h (1500 mph) or Mach 3.2. As it reentered the atmosphere, falling like a badminton shuttlecock almost straight down, the rushing air sounded like a hurricane, said Melvill. "Coming down is frightening, because of that roaring sound," he said. "You can really hear how that vehicle is being pounded."...

Despite Melvill's 25 years of piloting experimental craft, he found even the normal operation of the rocketship alarming... The craft suddenly lurched over 90° to the right, and as soon as he brought it back to level it then rolled 90° to the right. "I was ready to hit the switch" to turn off the motor and abort the flight, he said, but the craft remained steady... "As I came out of the atmosphere I no longer had any attitude control..."

What I love about this photo: the spacecraft, carrier jet and chase plane were all designed by Rutan. It’s an absolute insistence on originality, on your own work, that I understand viscerally—it’s deeply artistic.

Rutan managed to do this relatively cheaply, chortling that his start-to-finish $20M budget would have paid for only a paper study if done by the government. The cost of the two paying space station passengers combined, $40M, would have funded another two SpaceShipOnes, those passengers went too early. And Paul Allen finally put some money into something worthwhile, and something more tangible than software, with real-world, touch-and-feel coolness.

The craft has an simple, innovative design which slows its descent: the wing structure flips up like a shuttlecock nosing down to earth. In its normal configuration, the vertical stabilizers looks like the fins on a ’57 Chevy. The spacecraft resembles those from kids’ books in the ’50s, including my favorites, The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree and The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. Its liftjet evokes the twin-tailed P38s from ‘Ikari Warriors’ and ‘1943: The Battle of Midway.’

The ship climbed really slowly, about an hour of circling around the airfield getting smaller and smaller. Then we got the word that the rocket was going to take off. The ship was about 2/3rds of the way almost directly between the horizon and the sun (the sun being fairly low since this is about 7:45 am). Then all of a sudden this huge contrail appeared and traveled straight up just to the right of the sun traveling at an amazing speed... The trail kept moving up until it seemed to be about 70 degrees above the horizon when the engine cut off. After a few minutes with everybody searching the sky for the craft, boom, a little sonic boom let loose and the ship then appeared. It circled around a few times on its way down and met up with the chase planes. They all flew in a pretty tight formation and the ship finally made an amazingly smooth landing, considering it was an unpowered, odd-looking, bulbous craft.

The mavericks behind this spaceshot and its prize are interesting characters. Burt Rutan designed the plane which his brother Dick Rutan flew around the world, nonstop, on a single tank of fuel. And the X Prize is funded by Anousheh Ansari, a Persian, female telecom entrepreneur. In fact, do-it-yourself rocketry is rapidly becoming a post-cashout geek playground, with X Prize contenders funded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and John Carmack of Id Software (‘Quake,’ ‘Doom’).

Not unlike the first U.S. and Soviet space travelers in 1961, and China's first successful spaceflight last October, these private citizens are pioneers in their own right.