Monday, June 21, 2004

Exploratin’

That Buck Rogers Stuff

The uninspiringly-named “SpaceShipOne” has completed its maiden voyage at America’s first licensed inland spaceport, ushering in the age of private space flight. All that remains now is for Bert Rutan’s team repeat the feat twice in two weeks, each time carrying three people, and the X-Prize will be theirs. (Let’s bask in this a bit… I’m sure we have about twelve hours of glory before al Jazeera, Reuters and the Berkeley Barb find some inane way to blame this success on ‘the Jews’.)

Interestingly, SpaceShipOne is being financed the same way all the great voyages in the last few centuries have been: by immense reserves of private capital held by men (not so much women, yet) entranced in equal measure by the potential for profit and the fascination of discovery. In this case, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is the lucky man, to the tune of $20 millon so far. Who knows? Maybe Microsoft will go down as the Medici family of its time in this regard.

As Minister Buckethead has noted extensively on this weblog and in hours of beery pontification, the future of space flight lies in the private sector, where ambition, genius, and market forces can strip away the unnecessary crapola governments bring to the project. SpaceShipOne has taken the all-important first step. Congratulations to Scaled Composites, Bert Rutan, and to test pilot Mike Melvill.


Posted by Johno on 06/21/04 at 04:40 PM
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