Rutan And Allen To Make First X-Prize Attempt Wednesday

When you ask Burt Rutan why he wants to go into space, you get a short history lesson on the shortcomings of NASA.

Rutan's SpaceShipOne is set to make the first of two X-Prize attempts Wednesday, flying to an altitude of 100 km (62 miles) twice in two weeks. It's a journey Rutan thinks should have happened long ago.

"By 1973, we had a space station, the Skylab, and we had multiple probes going up to planets. So, all this wonderful stuff happened in 10 to 15 years," he told the BBC. "About that time, there should have been enormous initiatives to make it affordable for people to fly in space, not just a handful of trained NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts. If you asked NASA in those days how long will it be until it is affordable so that I can fly, the answer would be, 'we're working on it and in 30 years there will be affordability.'"

Now, 31 years later, space has been largely restricted to that same elite group of astronauts and cosmonauts -- and China's first "taikonaut." But neither Burt nor the rest of us has yet to make it there. And these days, when you ask NASA how long it will take for space flight to become affordable to the average human, you get an eerily familiar answer: about 30 years.

"If it is 30 years, I will 90 and will a guy who is 90 get to fly?" he told the BBC.

For most of us, that would be the end of the discussion, but this is Rutan. "The first choice was to give up, and admit that I would never go into space, never see that black sky. The other choice I had was to do something about it," he said. Wednesday, his company will take another step toward that goal.

(ANN has a contingent of reporters at Mojave for Wednesday's SpaceShipOne launch. Stay tuned for live updates beginning Wednesday morning -- ed.)

FMI: www.scaled.com