May 13, 2004 – Todd McCaffrey

Yay! Way to go Burt! 212,000 feet and climbing!!!

By Todd | May 13, 2004 | Comments 0 Comment

Today, Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan’s famous aircraft development organization, launched Spaceship One to an altitude of 212,000 feet with speeds reaching Mach 2. Scaled, backed by Paul Allen (of Microsoft fame — and a longtime s-f fan), launched their SpaceShip One initiative in a bid to capture the $10,000,000 X-prize by providing a low-cost commercial spaceflight for anyone.

And today, SpaceShip One took a huge step towards reaching that goal.

Interestingly, it’s guessed that they’ve spent about $25 million so far — compare that to $5 billion for just ONE space shuttle (that’s excluding the costs of *launching* it).

According to the LA Times, Burt said that they’re hoping to win the X-prize this summer.

Read Scaled’s Press release here
or the LA Times report here
(you may have to sign on for the LA Times).

Check out Scaled’s Flight Test page for a more detailed flight results (including that the darned avionics failed) here.

Wow! My congratulations to everyone who worked on this magnificent project!

— Todd

Another letter from Bats

By | May 13, 2004 | Comments 0 Comment

Bats here again

So there is no Silver dragon,thinking wouldn’t that sound
like a new idea,Silver Queen,and a very special boy,
would be her Rider,a very low-cast boy,for a change she will have to find him! I know It’s good,just put in the Book.

Thanks Bats.

Nope, Bats, no Silver Queen, no low-cast boy (never a boy riding a queen). It won’t happen on Pern, sorry. Mum is very firm about this — the only colors are gold, bronze, brown, blue, and green. Ruth is a sport, a one-off (only one) special. The rules of Pern were established by Mum and I honor them. The events of Dragonsblood should shed more light on this.