SpaceShipOne flew to space this morning, for the second time in less than a week; this time it won the Ansari X-Prize! Pilot Brian Bennie (the 2nd pilot for these tests) took off from the Mojave Spaceport in California. The flight was completely smooth, with no barrel rolls. Maybe test flights SHOULD be made by the young! LOL… Monday’s flight beat records set by NASA’s X-15 aircraft 40 years ago.
A serious run for the X-Prize money will be made on 29Sep04 by Paul Allen’s SpaceShipOne. This will be the first launch for the prize, and the second launch for SS1 after it’s suborbital flight in June. Their 2nd Prize launch is set for October 2nd.
The Ansari X-Prize is $10M, to be awarded to the first team that puts the equivalent of 3 men in orbit, lands, and repeats the feat in 2 weeks in the same vehicle. No governments need apply; this is strictly for real people and private organizations or companies. The Romanian Team had a successful test launch on the 13th (yesterday as I write this); the Da Vinci Team has a launch for the prize set up on October 2nd of their Wildfire; and there are 23 more teams in for the prize.
Right now, SpaceShipOne and Wildfire are neck-and-neck, and I am rooting for Da Vinci. Allen is financing SS1 with his Microsoft earnings, using a radical new engine developed by SpaceDev, and launching from the back of a modified aircraft. Da Vinci is an all-volunteer team from Canada, financed by an online casino, and launching from a balloon! Now there is my kind of space program, by the people, for the people!
If you want to learn more about the X-Prize and the attitude behind it, here are a few more links you can look into. For attitude, the best story I have seen comes from Space Daily. To learn more about the engine behind SS1 (and their satellite launch vehicle) check out Universe Today.
If you want to check out all the Teams involved in the contest, XPrize Primary is your best bet. If you want to get directly involved, either as a Teacher looking to fire up your student’s, or a participant looking to enter, be sure to look into Build A Rocket. And if you are a teacher, be aware there is a prize (the EGGs prize) for the middle school team who can meet the criteria!
We have now detected smaller ExoPlanets (planets around other stars) than ever before, for the first time bringing us to the range of rocky planets, rather than gas giants. Some of them orbit at the right distance from their stars to make life as we know it possible. The odds that we are not alone in the Universe have once more gone up!
The announcement came today both from NASA and the ESA, and reading the two different stories gives you the feeling that their group was the one that made the discovery, in a vacume (pun intended) with no other players.
Astronomy is based on a world-wide network of investigators and equipment, most of them unpaid amateurs, in constant touch with each other to verify their findings. While I consider this story to be major news, I am a bit disappointed in the way each of the two major, government-funded organizations responsible for launching the satellites that brought in the raw data play it up as if it was theirs alone. Just the fact that they released the story on the same day underscores how the astronomy community works. Now if only we could keep the government media flacks out of the loop… LOL
On 30Jun1908 an explosion occurred in Tunguska, Siberia; the cause has been a mystery to this day, with the most common culprit being assumed to be a meteor. Because of the strength of the blast, antimatter or a mini black hole have been speculated as being involved.
But now something even stranger is being reported; an Alien device has supposedly been discovered, along with a 50 kilogram meteor remnant. The discovery was made based on leads given from orbital photographs, and some surprisingly respected news sources (including The Economist and the Register) have been reporting it. There is a lack of follow-up details, however; either it is not true, or perhaps someone slapped a lid on it.
If anyone has more hard facts, please send them my way, or the links to them. While waiting for that data, here are the links I have so far… from the Turkish Press, Space Daily, Yahoo, and Interfax RU.
If it is true, I don’t find it very comforting. I was hoping for the first non-human contact to be in the form of a research probe entering our solar system, or a trading consortium stopping by to see what trinkets they could swap us in return for buying Jupiter as a refueling station on their way to more profitable markets. I don’t believe in the “Aliens will Save Us” outlook. I also don’t believe in the cold-war inspired attitude of “What isn’t Us is the Enemy” portrayed in so many Hollywood productions. I do believe that any intelligence we meet will have been shaped by basic evolutionary needs to survive first, communicate second, and work with us only when it is to their own advantage.
All of which leads me to the conclusion that if first contact was made by blasting a few hundred square kilometers of our planet into twisted wreckage, we may have a problem. Maybe that problem was a malfunctioning probe, or something that has drifted between the stars for millennium before chance caused it to impact with Earth. But it could have also been a ranging shot, or a small Berserker device doing what it could to destroy as much life as possible with it’s limited resources.
Bottom line is, I need more info than this sparse report gives us.
The next major exploration we humans are going for is Saturn. The Cassinni-Huygens probe is burning it’s way into SOI (Saturn Orbital Insertion) as I type this, and in about 7 hours the first images should be returned to earth. That is assuming it doesn’t burn up while doing the Saturn Aerobraking (our first aerobraking attempt on a gas giant); and even if it does, we will learn a lot from the data it sends before it turns into a crispy critter.
My own hope is it will survive long enough to make it into a stable orbit. And even better, to fullfill its 4 year mission, and fully map Saturn and explore that planet’s satellittes before it stops reporting back to us!
Here are a few of the better links for you to use to check on it’s progress…
To view the Video as it arrives…
Where Is It Now…
There are a LOT more; this isn’t just a NASA project, it includes the ESA and some others! But this should get you started, at least! LOL…
I wanted to trumpet the news about SpaceShip1, but by the time I had time to do an entry for it here the whole world already knew about it. So all I can really do is sing the praises about a space program that can be done for minimum money, and without the Government (ANYBODIE’S government, of whatever flavor) having a say in how, when, and why it all gets done!
For the migration into space to work to humanity’s advantage, it has to be done by people, not paramilitary organizations. SpaceShip1 is the only attempt that actually succeeded in breaching the atmosphere so far, in anything large enough to carry a human. There is hope for us yet; with hard work, luck, and the right attitude we will get there!
And their home page is: