The world's first private rocketship blasted into space for the second time in five days Monday, snatching a 10-million-dollar prize and ushering in a new era of space tourism.
In a flawless mission, SpaceShipOne, piloted by former US navy test pilot Brian Binnie, also smashed the sub-orbital flight altitude record, reaching 367,442 feet (69.6 miles/112 kilometers), judges announced.
"We have truly entered a new space age," said US astronaut Rick Searfoss, chief judge of the 10-million-dollar Ansari X Prize, declaring SpaceShipOne the winner of the purse designed to spawn commercial space travel.
"It's an age that will be defined by the art of the impossible, not by what is politically possible," he said, adding that the US government space programme had "in many respects lost its way."
US President George W. Bush called the spacecraft's designer, aviation pioneer Burt Rutan and his team to congratulate them on their feat, organisers said.
"This is a historic day," said Marion Blakey, head of the Federal Aviation Administration as awarded Binnie his astonaut wings after he glided back into California's Mojave desert to the cheers of thousands.
The stubby, winged SpaceShipOne had "opened a new frontier in commercial human space travel" that will revolutionise both space and earthly transport, Blakey said.
During its nearly 90-minute flight that took it to the edge of space, the craft reached speeds of up to 3,500 kilometers (2,187 miles) per hour before punching through the Earth's atmosphere.
It broke the altitude record for sub-orbital flight of 354,200 feetmiles/108 kilometers) set by the X-15 rocket plane 41 years ago.
"We blew the X-15 away," said Peter Diamandis, president of the X Prize Foundation that will award the SpaceShipOne team a cheque for 10 million dollars and a trophy at ceremony in St. Louis on November 6.
As SpaceShipOne touched down, Rutan stood alongside British tycoon Richard Branson and Diamandis leaping for joy and cheering.
Branson, owner of the Virgin Atlantic airline, last week announced plans to join the private space race using a craft based on SpaceShipOne, offering passengers space jaunts for about 200,000 dollars a trip.
To win the X Prize, the same reusable manned spacecraft needed to make two journeys into space within two weeks while carrying the equivalent weight of two passengers.
Rutan was jubilant, saying he could hardly believe he and his Mojave Aerospace Ventures team had won the prize after flying just six powered flights, including three space flights, in SpaceShipOne.
Long an outspoken adversary of the mainstream space industry and NASA, Rutan cocked a victorious snoot at his rivals, deriding what he called the "Boeings, the Lockheeds, the naysayers in Houston."
"I have a hell of lot bigger goal than they do," he said vowing to develop a private commercial spacecraft for Branson that would be "at least 100 times safer than anything that is ever flown into space."
Pilot Binnie, 51, described the flight that earned him his astronaut's wings as a "dream come true," revealing that he floated a model of SpaceShipOne in its cockpit as he became weightless for about four minutes.
During the first leg of its X Prize bid on Wednesday, SpaceShipOne -- piloted by Mike Melville, who flew its first space flight on June 21 -- the plane rolled 29 times, corkscrewing through the sky and striking horror into the hearts of onlookers.
But there were no problems this time and Binnie managed to ignite the rocket engine for a total of 84 seconds, five seconds more than Melvill.
"So it wasn't as much fun as Mike's flight, but we got a little bit higher and it was enjoyable," Binnie said.
The rocketship blasted into space after separating from the underbelly of its mother plane, White Knight, at around 46,000-feet (13,800 meters) and glided back to Earth about half an hour later.
A galaxy of celebrities braved the desert to witness the flight, including "Star Trek" actor William Shatner, music mogul Quincy Jones, jazz musician Herbie Hancock and Kiss rock group singer Gene Simmons.
On Monday, one of SpaceShipOne's sponsors, softdrink maker 7 UP, announced it would offer consumers a prize of the first free tickets to space in a competition that has yet to be finalised.
Rutan selected October 4 to coincide with the 47th anniversary of the 1957 launch of the Soviet Union's first satellite, Sputnik I, which sparked the original space race between Moscow and Washington.
The X Prize, funded by private donors, was established in 1996 and modelled on the 25,000-dollar Orteig prize that aviator Charles Lindbergh won when he became the first solo pilot to cross the Atlantic in 1927, spurring commercial air travel.
Virgin Galactic is a company established by Richard Branson's Virgin Group to undertake the challenge of developing space tourism for everybody.
Virgin Galactic will own and operate privately built spaceships, modelled on the history-making SpaceShipOne craft. These spaceships will allow affordable sub-orbital space tourism for the first time in our history.
Due to the unique technology developed by Burt Rutan, this space craft design has overcome the difficult issues of re-entry into the earth's atmosphere faced by so many designers trying to create efficient, re-usable space vehicles.
We believe that it is in mankind's interest to develop our knowledge and understanding as well as access to space. Every customer of Virgin Galactic will be helping the development of a new generation of space craft.
Designs for the Virgin Galactic craft are progressing on a weekly basis at Rutan's base in Mojave, California and by early 2005 the final design for the maiden Virgin Galactic ship, the VSS (Virgin SpaceShip) Enterprise, should be signed-off.
What will follow will be a concerted Research and Development programme to earn the craft their qualification to carry some of the world's first scheduled space tourists. Safety is paramount. It is planned to have multiple levels of redundancy on key systems in order to achieve a very robust system in every phase of flight.
Virgin's experience in aviation, adventure, luxury travel and cutting-edge design will be vital in contributing to the design of the spaceship, the smooth operation of the spaceline and creating an unforgettable experience unlike any other available to mankind.
"We've always had a dream of developing a space tourism business and Paul Allen's vision, combined with Burt Rutan's technological brilliance, have brought that dream a step closer to reality. The deal with Mojave Aerospace Ventures is just the start of what we believe will be a new era in the history of mankind, one day making the affordable exploration of space by human beings a real possibility."
Richard Branson
C'est clair..
Totalement inutile, sauf pour les scienti(stes)(fiques) bien-sûr...
How nino t'es un scienti(ste)(fique) toi aussi non !
C'est certain que du point de vue d'un africain ca parait inutile, mais pour les occidentaux c'est un pas logique, celui vers l'espace.
Le plus important ils en ont les moyens.
Ce qui m'a plu c'est que lors de l'emission sur ces vols on pouvait remarquer que des noirs americains y etaient associes.
Bon c'est un progres et une vulgarisation des sciences et technologies aussi.
- On remarquera que le financier de cette societe scaled composites est un des membres fondateur de la societe microsoft paul allen, qui a du depenser quelques 20 millions de dollars pour la construction de ces appareils white knight et Space Ship One
- On remarquere egalement que le principal financier de ce prix X-prize est une jeune femme d'origine iranienne de la famille Ansari.
Le prochain prix X-prize cup aura une valeur de 20 millions de dollars environ (je crois), il s'agira alors pour les competiteurs de se rapprocher un peu plus de l'orbite.
Dernière édition par M.O.P. le Ven 08 Oct 2004 06:48; édité 1 fois
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Thrill seekers are plunking down six figures to ride rockets that haven't even been built yet, and a new airline called Virgin Galactic promises to be up and soaring in the next three years. Still, the budding space tourism industry faces a myriad of safety concerns -- in the sky and on the ground -- that must be resolved before any paying passenger takes off.
The rules that will govern the industry in the United States remain under discussion between federal regulators and rocket developers, and legislation is still before Congress.
The pace of negotiations and the ultimate shape of the regulations could determine whether the sky-high enthusiasm for space tourism - fueled by the historic suborbital flights of SpaceShipOne -- grows or wanes, especially among investors.
Federal Aviation Administration chief Marion C. Blakey this week visited Xcor Aerospace, a rocket developer just down the Mojave Airport flight line from SpaceShipOne's home. She talked of partnership with the new industry and said it was important for the United States to be the world leader.
She made clear, however, that broad safety issues are the agency's topic No. 1.
"Our first concern will be the safety of the uninvolved public, making sure that as this grows and develops that we're doing everything we can to protect the folks on the ground, to make sure that the people who go into space understand the risks," she said. "It will be a risky business for many years to come, no doubt."
The FAA for several years has been studying what the average passenger will face from G-force and psychological factors, and what type of medical fitness he or she will require, Blakey said.
There is also a question of what information a passenger should have, about safety records, for example, to assess risk and make a meaningful informed-consent statement.
Patti Grace Smith, associate administrator for the FAA's office of commercial space transportation, indicated passenger awareness is one of the "hurdles" in the way of making space travel as routine as aviation.
"The kind of threshold that we will have to figure out how to achieve is the cognizance issue: How do we know that they understand the risk that they are taking? How do we know that they understand what they're doing?" she said.
Xcor President Jeff Greason, who hopes to build a rocket plane that can fly off a runway, said talks with the government have come far but there is much work ahead on the regulatory front.
Greason said he is in total agreement that it is necessary for regulators to ensure that potential passengers have adequate information. But he sees a "critical distinction" between the risk faced by the uninvolved public and that faced by those who want to fly into space.
"The uninvolved public has to be held to a very high level of safety," he said. "There's no reason they should be exposed to a level of risk that's different than they see from any other aspect of industrial life.
"The involved passenger, the people who are deliberately putting their lives and treasure at risk to open the space frontier they've dreamed of their entire lives, as long as they know what they're getting into, I think they have to be allowed to take that risk."
One of the nation's advantages, he asserted, is that there is still a "culture of risk acceptance as long as it's only for the participant."
Blakey believes that passengers through many years of airline travel have developed an expectation of a certain amount of regulatory oversight.
"What that should be in commercial space, we're working with right now. And as I say, we definitely see that the level of risk is very different," she said.
Greason said commercial space transportation, for it to succeed, has to chart new ground to improve the level of safety set by government programs such as the space shuttle.
"That means the classic regulatory prescriptive approach of 'We'll do it just like all those other successful very safe personal space transportation vehicles' can't work," he said. "It's a paradoxical, hard to understand thing, but in order to achieve greater safety, we have to allow many approaches to be tried, because only in that way can we find out experimentally those which offer greater safety."
Inscrit le: 09 Oct 2004 Messages: 90 Localisation: canada
Posté le: Sam 09 Oct 2004 19:56 Sujet du message: afrocentric space entrepreneur
Je me souviens avoir lu un article de M. Kamau il y a plusieurs années contre la marriage mixte. Il semble avoir changé de créneau et s'interesse maintenant a la course à l'espace ! lSon site web semble inactif en ce moment mais voici un article parlant de lui qui interessera peut etre certains d'entre vous :
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J'arrive même pas à visualiser 20 millions... Même 2 millions d'ailleurs! C'est impressionnant on pourrait en faire des choses avec tout ça!