June 03, 2004

SpaceShipOne to attempt XPrize flights later this month

This is a big story, and when they succeed it will be Page One everywhere. It will also become the big thing at Oshkosh this summer.

If they succeed in these June attempts, I'm hoping that they will bring both craft to the show. There's precedent for this, Rutan brought Voyager to Oshkosh before and, I think after, the round-the-world flight.

This alone will make OSH the place to be this summer.

Reuters via Yahoo!:

The world's first privately funded rocket plane plans to shoot beyond the uppermost layers of Earth's atmosphere later this month in a bid to demonstrate the viability of commercial space flight, organizers of the project said on Wednesday.

AP, via Yahoo!:

SpaceShipOne, created by aviation designer Burt Rutan and funded by billionaire Paul Allen, will attempt to reach an altitude of 62 miles on a suborbital flight over the Mojave Desert on June 21.

UPDATE: Here's a link to Scaled Composites' website. As of right now, though, the link on their front page, to details about the flight, is broken. (Burt and co. build awesome air/space-craft, but their website is weak.)

Posted by jackhodgson at June 3, 2004 11:43 AM