Private
Space Flight
1 Airplane designer Burt Rutan was 14 years
old when the USSR launched Sputnik 1.1 He
believed that government research into space
travel would someday mean he too would be
5 able to journey to space. By the mid-1990s,
however, Rutan had realized that waiting for
the government wasn’t going to work.
It was then that he resolved to build his own
spaceship. “If my dream was going to come
10 true—of floating2 weightless in the black sky
and being thrilled by the sight of Earth from
outside our atmosphere3—I’d have to get
things started myself,” said Rutan.
The Dream of Space Flight
15 Rutan was encouraged to build his own
spaceship by the history of airplane design
itself. Five years after the Wright brothers’4
first flight in 1903, the airplane was still just
On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne dropped from
a dangerous curiosity. Only a dozen or so
its mother ship White Knight and flew to the edge of 20 people had tried flying in an airplane. Yet by
space—more than 100 km above the Earth’s surface.
1912 hundreds of pilots had flown airplanes
of different designs that were developed
through private enterprise.5 The bad designs
crashed; the good designs flew. Soon factories
25 in France, England, and Germany were
producing hundreds, and then thousands, of
airplanes a year. “Why? I believe the answer
lay in two observations: ‘That’s gotta be fun’
and ‘Maybe I can do that,’” says Rutan.
1
putnik 1 was the first man-made object sent into space to circle the
S
earth in 1957.
2
Something that floats in or through the air hangs in it or moves slowly
and gently through it.
3
The Earth’s atmosphere is the layer of air that surrounds it.
4
The Wright brothers are two Americans who built and flew the first
powered airplane.
5
Private enterprise is business activity that is not directed or controlled
by the government.
In his workshop in the Mojave Desert, California,
Burt Rutan stands before the spaceship he designed. Unit 12A To the Edge of Space
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, at 60 feet
long (18 meters), will be twice as long as
the original SpaceShipOne. It will carry six
passengers and two pilots aboard.
25 The Dream Becomes Real
Rutan’s optimism finally paid off. In 2004 his specially designed spaceship,
SpaceShipOne, successfully entered space and made it back to earth twice in
two weeks. Those were the requirements to win the ten-million-dollar
Ansari X Prize, a prize designed to encourage the development of private
space travel. Rutan’s success got the world’s attention, and various schemes
30 to commercialize private space travel began to appear.
An Incredible Opportunity
In one such scheme, Sir Richard Branson has
licensed the technology of SpaceShipOne for his
company, Virgin Galactic, which hopes to offer
35 people of all shapes, sizes, and ages the opportunity
to visit space. Virgin’s first spaceships will have two
pilots and six passengers aboard. Passengers will
float weightless in space for six thrilling minutes
as they gaze out at space through a large window.
40 “Of all the things we’ve done,” Branson says,
“Virgin Galactic is the one I’m most excited
Sir Richard Branson (left) and Burt Rutan
about. Every time I look up in the sky at night, stand in front of a model of WhiteKnightTwo,
I think about how incredible the opportunity is. the aircraft that will carry SpaceShipTwo on
the first part of its flight. Named “Eve,” after
People have been waiting for this moment for Sir Richard Branson’s mother, WhiteKnightTwo
thousands of years.” can fly to over 15,000 meters (50,000 feet).
Unit 12 Going to Extremes
