Words Angie Bautista
At one point or another in our childhood, many of us dreamed of becoming astronauts. The idea of
unearthing the secrets of a world beyond Earth excites philomaths with an unfathomable hunger for
discovery. Plus, the possibility of effortless weightlessness is more than enough to attract sitomaniacs
such as yours truly. For years, this childhood dream remained but a fantasy to many. Only vigorously trained
astronauts from the U.S. military or NASA seem to have the right to this dream.
But June 21, 2004 gave light to a dawning era in space exploration. The date marked the first sub-orbital
mission of SpaceShipOne, an aircraft financed, not by the U.S. government, but Scaled Composites, a
privately owned company headed by Burt Rutan. "Today's flight marks a critical turning point in the history
of aerospace," Rutan said. "We have redefined space travel as we know it."
The mission was also the first with an aircraft manned by a civilian pilot, Mike Melvill. At the age of 63,
Melvill fulfilled a childhood dream that had seemed impossible for a civilian such as himself. Dubbed as the
"people's astronaut," he recalls the experience quite vividly and with obvious appreciation. "The sky was
jet-black above, and it gets very light blue along the horizon. The Earth is so beautiful, the colors of the high
desert and out over the coastline, and all the fog or low stratus that's over L.A. looked exactly like snow," Melvill
said. "It blew me away, it really did." The flight earned Melvill the first set of commercial astronaut's wings ever
awarded by the Federal Aviation Administration. A representative from the Guinness Book of World Records
presented a plaque recognizing the feat as a space first.
Over 11,000 spectators witnessed the record-breaking aeronautical flight as it soared over what was coined
as America's first inland Spaceport, the Mojave Desert in California. The White Knight carrier plane circled
over the spaceport for about an hour before releasing SpaceShipOne at an altitude of 47,000 feet. The hybrid
motor burned for a good 76 seconds, propelling the aircraft to 2.9 Mach (2,150 miles per hour) - nearly three
times the speed of sound. At motor burn out, SpaceShipOne was at 180,000 feet. The remaining momentum
carried the rocket ship to an apogee of 328,491 feet, or 62.2 statute miles, or 100.1 kilometers.
Feats of this magnitude are not without problems, and the SpaceShipOne mission was no exception. There was
a malfunction in the system that was supposed to stabilize the aircraft during supersonic flight. "That's what
drove me 20 miles away in about five seconds," Melvill related. He switched to a backup system that allowed him
to stop the rocket plane from going into an uncontrollable roll. "I went to the backup, and the backup saved the
day," he said. Rutan said the problem was the most serious safety issue encountered in the SpaceShipOne project.
"There is no way we will fly again without knowing the cause and without assuring that we fixed it." But he also
expressed confidence that the problem will be resolved quickly.
In spite of the problems encountered, the mission was an overall triumph. Rutan expressed, "Our success proves
without question that manned space flight does not require mammoth government expenditures...it can be done by
a small company operating with limited resources and a few dozen dedicated employees." For Rutan who has managed
to do the seemingly impossible, space is the limit for dreams.
