Instapundit - MAX BOOT has a column on Burt Rutan and the X-Prize that's worth reading. Best bit:
Skeptics will scoff at what Burt Rutan, the designer of SpaceShipOne, accomplished. They will note, rightly, that spending a few minutes in suborbital flight is no more than what Alan Shepard achieved in his Mercury capsule 43 years ago. And the method Rutan used, hauling a cigar-shaped rocket plane into the sky aboard a mother ship, duplicates the approach of the X planes from that same long-gone age.
Rutan's achievement is nevertheless enormous: He rescued manned spaceflight from the dead end that NASA reached after the last of the Apollo moon landings in 1972. SpaceShipOne has shown the way toward the development of a space industry that can pick up where government left off by turning space travel into something approximating airplane travel in the 1930s: an attainable luxury for regular, if well-to-do, folks. . . .
What's NASA's role in all this? The president's space commission, which issued its report in June, had the right idea: NASA needs to get out of the business of hauling cargo into orbit. It should leave that mission to the private sector and concentrate on deep-space exploration and scientific research, sharing the fruits with industry.
The model should be the early days of aviation in the 1920s and 1930s. Washington didn't set up its own airline. Instead, it offered contracts to private carriers to deliver airmail. Many of them began hauling passengers on the side, giving birth to major airlines like United, American and TWA. Likewise, space travel needs to be developed primarily by private companies with some federal subsidies.
That represents a huge change from the government-centric paradigm that the U.S., Russia, Europe and others have been pursuing for decades, and it is sure to be resisted by old NASA hands. But who can argue with success? SpaceShipOne has just blasted a hole in the argument that private space travel can't get off the ground. |
