Private Spaceflight Company Raises Price For Passenger
Flights
ANN 04.01.07 SPECIAL EDITION: "Whooo-wee!" With
that pronouncement, Scaled Composites test pilot Mike Melville
heralded in a new era of privately funded, commercial spaceflight
for the masses last month... and he did so much faster than
originally intended, Scaled founder Burt Rutan told ANN in an
exclusive interview.
"Uh, Burt, I think I'm seeing things," Melville reportedly said
over the radio, 15 seconds after he engaged the rocket booster
engine onboard the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo testbed -- dubbed
"Enterprise" -- during its first powered test flight operation
February 28. "The stars are gettin' wavy... wait, now they're
zippin' by me."
When ground controllers asked Melville to confirm his velocity,
Melville replied the needle was off the scale. "We seem to be
flying a bit faster than computer modeling indicated," the test
pilot reported in a nonchalant manner. "Wait a sec... uh, I coulda
sworn I just saw the Moon zip by. Whoo-wee!"
When the spacecraft's powdered-rubber, nitrous, and
dilithium-fueled rocket motor disengaged two minutes after initial
firing, Melville told controllers he vaguely recognized his
surroundings.
"It looks like I'm in a high orbit over Pluto," Melville relayed
to astonished controllers. "For the record, it looks like a planet
to me."
After confirming Melville had sufficient oxygen onboard for two
days of interplanetary travel, Scaled engineers went to work to
determine how the Enterprise -- originally intended to be capable
of only a few minutes of suborbital flight -- had traveled where no
man had ever gone before. It wasn't long before the skilled group
of technicians found their answer.
"Yup, they should have carried the seven," Rutan said. "Our
thrust-to-weight ratio was completely haywire. We wound up with
approximately 250,000,000,000 times more thrust than we
needed for a suborbital flight.
"Fortunately, we entered into this endeavor with an abundance of
caution," Rutan continued. "Our initial concerns that we had
'overbuilt' our spacecraft turned out to be unfounded -- looks like
we built it just right. Mike had plenty of fuel, food and
water onboard for a return trip.
"I'm just happy we thought to include subspace radio technology
and inertial dampeners onboard," Rutan said. "I'm even happier [Sir
Richard] Branson paid for 'em."
After 36 hours observing Pluto, Melville fired SpaceShipTwo's
restartable rocket motor once again, and returned to
low-earth-orbit. He then engaged the spaceship's patented
"feathering" reentry system, and came in for a perfect landing in
the Mojave Desert.
Rutan said the company will continue it's test program, before
starting flights with passengers onboard in early 2009 from
Spaceport America in Upham, NM.
"Obviously, this changes the marketing dynamic a bit," Rutan
said. "Virgin Galactic got plenty of customers charging $200K for a
six-minute trip into weightlessness. We suspect people will pay
even more for a faster-than-light trip to the stars... we're
thinking $500 million per person is a good round number."
NASA officials -- perhaps aware their agency had just been
rendered completely and utterly obsolete -- declined to comment on
Scaled Composites' latest feat.
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