The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

By ANN Correspondent Kevin O'Brien

Kevin O'Brien, one of the several reporters ANN has assigned to the Rutan space mission in Mojave, spent a fitful night Tuesday -- as we imagine a lot of people at the spaceport did. On the eve of a great event such as this one, it's time to reflect, time to remember and time to wonder.

Mojave (CA), Near Midnight, September 28th -- The moon glows in the sky, full and clean, over the hangar from which the SpaceShipOne/White Knight combination will issue. We all commented on the moon last night and it was still with us in the morning: in the sky, and on our minds.

Some dismiss private space travel as a hobbyhorse of tinkerers and cranks. Aviation itself was once a backwater populated by massive government-funded projects and tinkerers in small groups; nowadays it can be, as on my trip out here, so commonplace that most of the people in the alloy mailing tube are more focused on their complaints about seating and food than on the miraculous fact that they have traveled from coast to coast at 450 knots, for a few hours' wages, only 100 years after the tinkerers beat the government projects into space.

Today was a crucial day on the long journey of space travel from spectacular, to commonplace. If Dr. Peter Diamandis and the Ansari X-Prize organizers, and the tinkerers and cranks, and their fans and enthusiasts at the government projects have their way, in the next century travel outside the atmosphere will become as dull and boring as travel inside it is now.

It's the part in between that promises to be exciting.

The Tower bears a sign proudly declaring Mojave "America's FIrst Inland Spaceport." And it is. This is only the second manned flight into space by private enterprise, and both have taken place here. (The first was SS1's June 21st Launch).

The takeoff of the SpaceShipOne/White Knight is a choreographed affair. First the Extra 300 chase plane takes off and circles. Then White Knight smoothly lifts SpaceShipOne into the air. The Beech Starship chase plane then takes off (with our Jim Campbell aboard).

About twenty minutes later a third chase plane, an Alpha Jet, taxis out. The Alpha Jet can start later; it climbs much faster than the other machines.

For most of the flight, the two experimental research craft will be accompanied by chase planes. But once the boost begins, SpaceShipOne is on its own, and the Alpha Jet falls behind; the spacecraft is alone until it resumes gliding flight at altitudes and speeds the military jet can reach.

As the planes climb to altitude the crowd at Mojave are excited, and pleased, and proud, whether they had anything to do with this flight or not. Even the firemen here who have, they tell me, "seen just about every kind of weird airplane that you could imagine." They know that this is different. This is history.

And even in the rising sun, the full moon hangs over the scene, as if to say: "So far so good. Now come back to me!"

FMI: www.scaled.com