w00t!
I wonder whether the other teams will keep going?
Da Vinci has already said they will continue with their plans regardless of today’s outcome. I welcome this, as my theory is “the more the better”!!
Oh, and …
Let’s here it for Scaled Composites! Wooooo!!!
No one owns www.spaceshipone.com?
An article on the BBC stated that the other teams may changed their target to orbital flights, which could give a longer lasting ‘space experience’ as opposed to the short lived sub orbital altitudes attained by SpaceShipOne
Now I need to start saving up so that I can afford a ride on Richard Branson’s ship in 2007.
Orbital flights would require orders of magnitude more energy, so I don’t think any of the other guys are going to be doing that anytime soon.
Hopefully some more prizes will be arranged for that laudible goal. 
Actually, that’s already happening. Robert Bigelow, chief of Bigelow Aerospace, has offered a $50 million prize to the first private team to complete an orbital vehicle by the end of the decade.
His company is developing inflatable space modules, and has plans for space hotels, so it’s not surprising that he’s pushing for orbital vehicles.
If you want to picky, the altitude isn’t official, and Brian Binny has to live for the next 24 hours. (part of the definition of a “safe landing”) Tho that’s just a technicality. Assuming the altitude holds up, they broke the X-15 record.
WOOT indeed.
Not only is Da Vinci planning on going up, then plan on doing the whole X-Prize itinerary (2 flights in 2 weeks, weight and altitude , etc)
I watch the whole thinkg on NASA TV webcast (which was much better than the space.com linked webcast I tried to watch for flight X1)
Brian
Good. Excellent. Suborbital hops are only one step, after all. Even NASA started with those. Step one completed – many more to come!
Ooo, this is cool!
I think a $100 million dollar prize would be better. I believe I heard on MSNBC that Rutan thinks they could go orbital for about $200 million. (I believe the comparison was to China’s space program, which put a man into space for about $2 billion, and Rutan thinks they could do it for a tenth of China’s cost.) Obviously, the prize wouldn’t pay for that, but then again, the X-Prize isn’t paying for SpaceShipOne. Paul Allen, for example, kicked in $20 million of his own money.
Sputnik and SpaceShip1 – Nice.
And my dad’s birthday - now I can’t forget any of the three. Woot for things on the same day.
So if he gets run over by a bus today, the record is off?
It is official. The X-Prize judging comittee has declared that SS1 has won the X-Prize. (I guess Brian doesn’t have to be worried about rival teams assassinating him)
Brian
Definitely an event worth celebrating! IMHO, this is how manned space travel should be driven - by the desire of private citizens to go into space. I’m glad to see that we’re starting to make that happen.
Why is that? The Mercury astronauts (aside from the two sub-orbital flights) seem to have orbited at 160-165 miles up - and it presumably becomes easier, not harder, to gain further altitude once you’re (a) further from the earth’s gravity, and (b) already past the atmosphere’s resistance.
That’s not saying that going into orbit doesn’t present other engineering obstacles that a sub-orbital flight doesn’t (I wouldn’t know; it’s not my area), but I’d think the additional need for energy would be linear, not astronomical :D.
Because orbit is a matter of velocity, not altitude. You can fly straight up to 160 miles without much problem, but unless you reach orbital velocity, you aren’t staying up there. Reaching orbital velocity takes roughly 10 times as much energy per payload as the suborbital hop SS1 accomplished does.
Hey … the pilots name is Brian … your name is Brian … Are you two actually the same person??? I mean, I’ve never seen you two together at the same time, ya know … :dubious:
You have to achieve 18,000 mph escape velocity to achieve orbit. I don’t believe SS1 achieved hypersonic flight, which is roughly Mach 4. That is an order of magnitude difference
So far, orbit is made by brute force from launch. SS1 style craft will be able to do it by finesse, which is to climb above the 62 mile threshold before stoking the coals to make orbit, doing it for less fuel per pound gross vehicle weight.
How they get back into the atmosphere will be interesting. Is there a better way than ablative heat shields or thermal tiles? Probably, but I do not know what it is, yet.
Well, the only reason we brake against the resistance of the atmosphere to shed our orbital speed, is because it uses much less fuel that braking against our own sustained rocket thrust to shed the same speed.
Theoretically we could, for example, brake at orbital altitude using our ship’s engine until we were not moving relative to the Earth’s surface. Then we could let ourselves fall, thrust downwards to counter excessive falling speed, and lower ourselves into the atmosphere and down to the ground as slowly as we want.
The problem with that is that it would use a truly enormous amaunt of fuel.
I was born a week after Alan Shepherd went up and I was keenly interested in the space program as soon as I was aware of it. I remember the night that the Apollo 11 mission landed. I ran outside to look at the moon. I couldn’t even articulate my excitement at knowing there were two guys walking around up there and a third orbiting. “F***ing WOW!” is the closest I can get with my adult vocabulary.
People want to add all kinds of qualifiers to the Spaceship One flight, seemingly to diminish its importance. That doesn’t bother me. This is a milestone on par with Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing and Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. I see a parallel to the national air races in the thirties, a time when the fastest airplanes in the world were not owned by the military.
I didn’t realize that they broke the X-15’s record. A bit sorry to see Joe Walker’s record go down but F***ing WOW!