This is slightly old, but it’s on all of the cable news networks. SpaceShipOne, the X-prize contestant designed by Burt Rutan, succesfully entered space and landed in the Mojave Desert. It’s the first civilian spaceflight ever. Woot! 
Yes, I’m excited as a little kid. Wow, that jump in my heart when I read that Mike (the pilot) had made it …
Here’s a bunch of news links …
Space.com Very slow to load right now … Gee, I wonder why? 
MSNBC
CNN
Oh boy oh boy oh boy!!! WOOOO HOOO!!!
You know I find it interesting that the first private company to put a man in space, Scaled Composites has elected to use older, experienced test pilots, rather than the young men that NASA used in the “Right Stuff” era. Mike Melville, the pilot and now astronaut, is 62 years old.
What’s the age that commercial airline pilots are forced to retire at?
I woke up early and skipped school to watch that live.
Totally worth it.
How likely would it be for NASA to adopt a similar system to replace the Space Shuttle? Is that at all feasable?
w00t! I watched it live (sort of) on nwcn.com when I should have been working. 
My husband woke up early (2:00AM!) and rode his motorcycle out to the desert to watch it live! He’s on his way home now, with a couple rolls of film to be developed, and a few pictures taken on the digital that I should be able to upload this evening when I get home from work. How cool is it that he got to be there to witness history being made. Amazing.
The press conference should be comming up in a few minutes, anyone know where we can watch it?
Like John Glenn?
It’s been a long road, gettin’ from there to here…
So where can I sign up to be on the next flight?
And they did that with only $20 million? Damn.
Yup. Rutan himself said so, and he’s already got the plans drawn up, if he hasn’t started construction of it.
The big difference is the shuttle reaches orbit, which requires ~5x the speed.
And the shuttle also carries a LOT more cargo.
(but then, is VASTLY more empensive)
Brian
After all, how often do you get the chance to see something like this IRL ? So, having lurched out of bed at 2:00 AM, I motored up to Mojave airport (now Mojave Spaceport ) to see what a space launch looks like when it’s handled by private enterprise. It’s cool.
I’d guess that there was between 5 and 10.000 people present (Mojave has 3600 inhabitants, incidentally), but there was plenty of room and the security arrangement was basically a yellow rope barrier between runway and crowd. The crowd had a high geek factor - people singing folk songs about spaceships, t-shirts saying “Actually I am a rocket scientist” or “Let’s do launch”, a bunch of libertarians celebrating the private nature of the enterprise - plenty to look at while we waited for things to get going.
About 06:0, the PA system informed us that the launch was on, that roll-out would be at 06:30 as planned and that we weren’t in for an airshow: “There will be no wing-walking and no planes flying upside down. At least we hope not.”
06:20 saw the first chase plane - a small propeller plane - take off. Then the main character arrived on stage. The White Knight / SpaceShipOne (WK/SS1) combo looks way, way better in real life than in pictures. Extremely graceful, like a seagull. They rolled slowly down a taxiway in front of the audience - it couldn’t have been more than 200 feet from the barrier - and turned to face the wind. The tanks were topped off, and off they went, followed by another chase plane.
Very undramatic, yet not at all anticlimactic. The crowd, at this point, was cheering and yelling stuff like “Fly straight, you bastard!” (Of course, was too cool for stuff like that. OK, so maybe I weren’t.)
The next 50 minutes or so was spent gaining altitude. The WK/SS1 circled over the airport, climbing. A third chaseplane - an Alphajet - took off.
As the WK/SS1 neared launch altitude, they became invisible to the naked eye, but we could follow them by their contrails. Then they moved east from the airport into the restricted space over the desert, and we could no longer see even the contrails. In effect, we were looking into the sun, trying to pick the planes out of the haze.
Then a small smoketrail appeared a couple of fingerwidths under the sun: SS1’s engine started. That thing moves. Shooting straight up, it covered a huge arc of sky in the 80 seconds the engine burned. Like watching a bottle rocket, but one that keeps going and going… The smoketrail grew and grew and grew and then stopped and started to dissipate. A little while later, a very satisfying sonic boom could be heard. Like idiots, we were all looking skyward, even though we knew we couldn’t possibly see a damn thing.
As SS1 performed its reentry dive, it joined up with the chase planes one by one, so at one time it was leading a 4-plane formation before it finally touched down to whoops and cheers. White Knight flew in to buzz the crowd - they got a well-deserved cheer, too.
And that was that. SS1 was towed (Incidentally, by a Ford pick-up truck. As someone said: “This is most definitely an American project!”) in front of the audience with the pilot, Michael Melvill, standing on top, looking like someone who was having a really, really, really good day. As well he should.
I so bloody hope the pics come out OK…
To an old phart who watched the moon landing as a kid, this is just the coolest thing ever!
Thanks for the report SN!
Brian
Oh, same here. I had to wipe a tear or two from my eye today.
Does this mean they’re going to try to do it again within 2 weeks?!? That would mean that they win right?
Rutan hasn’t submitted formal notification that they’re going for the attempt. Best guess is that he’s going to try and sync it somehow with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing which was on July 20th, IIRC.