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.

FMI: www.virgingalactic.com/FTL