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In July of 2004, Mike Melvill sat in SpaceShipOne as it was dropped from the mother ship, WhiteKnightOne, which had carried it to an altitude of 50,000 feet. After safely clearing the mother ship, Melvill ignited the rockets on SpaceShipOne, and pointed the nose upwards toward space. Melvill piloted SpaceShipOne on a parabolic flight, the arc of which reached an altitude of 328,491 feet, exceeding the internationally recognized boundary of space by 408 feet. With this flight, Melvill became the first civilian astronaut in the history of space flight. Mike Melvill and his employer, Burt Rutan, had achieved a goal that previously had only been attained by the most powerful governments on earth. Building upon the success of SpaceShipOne, Burt Rutan and his partner, Richard Branson, have formed Virgin Galactic; a company they hope will be the first to offer regularly scheduled space flights to paying passengers. The spaceship, which will carry six passengers, is based upon SpaceShipOne and will accordingly be named SpaceShipTwo. The first passenger flights are expected to begin in late 2009 or 2010. Burt Rutan has pledged that his passenger carrying spacecraft will be "at least a hundred times safer than anything that's ever flown man into space, and probably a lot more." But Rutan and Branson are not the only players in the embryonic civilian space flight industry. Companies such as Armadillo Aerospace and XCOR Aerospace are among roughly a half dozen companies attempting to develop vehicles that will be able to carry passengers on sub-orbital space flights. The sub-orbital flights will allow passengers to see the curve of the earth and the blackness of space, as well as being able to experience a few moments of weightlessness. The long-range goal of most companies in the civilian space flight industry is to eventually be able to offer safe, orbital flights, instead of only sub-orbital flights. Eventually, passengers may be able to book a vacation in an orbiting space hotel. And in the distant future, there may even be civilian passenger flights to the moon, or even beyond. Most of that is quite a ways off, but it appears that the opportunity to experience space flight - for anybody who can afford a ticket and is in reasonably good health - will very soon be a reality. |