Not sure whether anybody here has been following this, but later this morning Burt Rutan's AZ-based Scaled Composites will attempt to qualify for the Ansari X-Prize, which is a privately-funded $10M prize intended to promote development of private commercial space-launch capability. The prize is awarded to the first company to put a three man crew into sub-orbital space (e.g. leave the atmosphere, which happens at about 62mi/100km altitude) and return them to earth, then repeat the exercise within two weeks. This effort was partially funded by Paul Allen (who made his billions in the earlier days of Microsoft), and will cost an estimated $20M -- which is a drop in the bucket compared to the income they'll be able to generate off cheap reusable commercial space flight.
Last month Rutan's ship achieved an altitude of about 40mi in a test flight. This morning the carrier ship (White Knight) will fly to 50,000 feet, then detach the rocket (Spaceship One), which will fire it's engines for 80 seconds, subjecting the pilot (one man and dead-weight equivalent to two passengers, per the X-prize rules) to about 4Gs of acceleration at around Mach 3. The whole process of going up and landing again should take less than 3 hours.
Scaled Composistes is WAY ahead of the competition here. The only other major teams are Armadillo Aerospace (run by John Carmack, head geek of id Software) and the Canadian-based Da Vinci Project. Neither has made any significant headway, certainly nothing approaching the magnitude or success of Scaled Composite's efforts. Although this particular flight has sub-orbital goals, Rutan stated in his speech this morning that "we will be going to orbit sooner than anyone expects".
Given the launch time, I'm guessing something should be on the news no later than 6PM EST once they've recovered the craft and had time to do the media song-and-dance thing.
http://www.scaled.com
http://www.xprize.com/
Rutan makes some really unique and interesting aircraft, which is part of what makes this so cool to me. (My father has built a couple of Rutan planes, which is where I learned fiberglass lay-up at the ripe old age of ten.) In the photo below you can see one of his Beech Starship executive planes in the back, the huge White Knight carrier aircraft, and slung beneath it, the Spaceship One craft itself. The second photo is Spaceship One making it's test flight last month. There are tons of other much larger photos on the SC website.
[image]http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/images/press-release-graphics/june21-cap_car_starship_800.jpg[/image]
[image]http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/images/press-release-graphics/june21-13p_boost_alpha.jpg[/image]
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