A 21st Century Kitty Hawk

As reported, well, everywhere, the first privately-funded spacecraft sucessfully broke the space barrier this morning. SpaceShipOne (creative name, guys) reached 100 km and sucessfully returned to Earth. Is this the dawning of a new age of space exploration or a gimmicky blip in history? I hope it’s the latter, and history supports that hope. After all, haven’t most of technology’s greatest innovators been privately-funded (if not self-funded) individuals?

For those non-space geeks, SpaceShipOne is funded by former Microsoft tycoon Paul Allen. It’s one of several efforts to win the X-Prize, a $10 million prize for taking 3 humans into space twice in two weeks–for building a reusable space craft. Obviously, at the costs involved in spaceflight, Allen (other luminaries include Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Doom creator John Romero) isn’t in it for the money. They’re all in it to get their names in the annals of history.

As far as I’m concerned, the world’s first private astronaut, one Mike Melvill, is one brave dude. As my wife put it, “I wouldn’t want to go up there in Paul Allen’s toy spaceship.” I know NASA is hardly accident-free, but you can expect a lot of fatalities in near future of private space exploration.

There’s quality coverage at Space.com, and here’s an article from MSNBC. Thanks to YardBoy for reminding me of Kitty Hawk.