The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

The Foundation has long called for the government to support such innovative projects and firms as SpaceX through tax breaks and other investment incentives, regulatory streamlining, and changes in launch service procurement policies. The group believes that the US can regain its leadership in space launch and at the same time lower the cost of space exploration, by changing how NASA, the Air Force, the FAA and other government entities approach space issues.

Tumlinson concluded:

“Although self funded, the Falcon and other breakthrough space systems need to be nurtured by our government, not ignored, tripped up by regulations or competed against by taxpayer financed efforts to prop up the old ways of doing things in space.

“If we are to return to the Moon and begin the exploration of Mars economically and in a sustainable fashion, we must have a partnership that encourages innovation, new ideas and access to capital and government and commercial markets by the Alt.Space community. If this can be done, we will all win, and our children will have a bright tomorrow as they open the space frontier.”

SpaceShipOne

The supersonic passenger aircraft, Concorde, flew its last scheduled commercial flight on 24 October 2003. The next day The Times featured a report by Giles Whittell which described a new spacecraft called SpaceShipOne:

Concorde dies, and with her a little of the test pilot in all of us. We don’t fly supersonic any more except to drop bombs. We don’t go to the Moon anymore except by robot. We don’t visit the Mariana Trench beeause we can’t be bothered. We won’t use the Shuttle for much longer because we’re too scared and not sure what it was for in the first place. The age when nations launched great technological schemes that were defiant but still admirable has ended. The age of zombies is upon us, and we are the zombies.

All of us? Not quite. In a corner of the United States, a group of men in flying suits and baseball caps is on the verge of doing something only military-industrial superpowers once did. The men plan to go into space, any day now, in a three-person rocketplane built entirely and not a little mysteriously with private funds. Powered by rubber and laughing gas, the rocket will scream up to a place 12 times higher than Everest, where the sky is black and Earth is like a big blue ball, then float back down like a shuttlecock.

I have seen a test flight, and it works. We were in a supermarket car park a few weeks ago in the Mojave desert, 100 miles (160km) north of Los Angeles. Nearby, in one of the world’s largest airliner storage depots, dozens of jumbos were waiting patiently for a global economic upturn, their windows whited out. But it was not one of these that appeared suddenly over the flat horizon of the supermarket’s roof. It was something alarming and jurassic: a mutant pterodactyl with two tails, papery wings and portholes covering its snout. It gave out an alien rasp and seemed to climb as fast as a kite in a gale without ever actually pointing skyward. It kept climbing, spiralling above the desert until it disappeared into a do. Before it did I grabbed my toddlers in turn and made them look. They seemed irritated, but some day they will thank me.

They will do so even though I am exaggerating what we saw. It was not the rocketplane, it was the mother ship. The spacecraft, being built largely in secret by Burt Rutan, America’s most remarkable aerospace designer, is dropped from a mother ship at 50,000ft (15,200m) and ignites its rocket engine there. And it is almost ready to go. Since that day in the car park it has been carried up, dropped and guided successfully back to Earth. All that remains is the space shot itself, a 120-mile parabolic flight that gives the pilot and his passengers three minutes of weightlessness and an extraordinary view. It is said that there are 10,000 people willing to pay $100,000 each for such a trip.