SpaceShipTwo Mothership Makes Maiden Flight 110
RobGoldsmith writes "Earlier this week images were appearing on the Net showing the WhiteKnightTwo craft doing some tests in Mojave. The earliest tests showed perhaps two of the engines being used, while a later test showed all the engines working and some further testing. Today the four Pratt & Whitney Canada PW308A engines finally carried the craft into the air. The maiden flight of the WhiteKnightTwo lasted just shy of one hour and happened today at around 08:15 local time, at Mojave air and spaceport. Rumors suggest that a Beechcraft King Air was used for a chase plane. The craft will be used to position Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo craft to fly into space; this is estimated to happen around 2010."
I just love this... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know why space flight is so fascinating, but this is just incredible. I'm really sad that I was born too late to experience the moon landings, so attempts like this to pick up the slack of the once dominant leader in space exploration are just exciting.
Re:Beauty of Capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
Capitalism is hardly responsible for it. No private company did this, until the Ansari X Prize subsidized them. That prize money was donated, making SS1 of charitable origins. Capitalism is anything but charitable. In fact, between the charity money and the academic foundation that dreamed up the whole thing, it's closer to a centralised, socialist model.
"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all." -- John Maynard Keynes
Re:Beauty of Capitalism (Score:3, Interesting)
To me it is plainly ludicrous to think that free market capitalism will contribute toward space exploration in any meaningful way - unless you seriously think that pleasure trips into low earth orbit for rich individuals are what its all about that is.
The only way that capitalism can really help out here is by continuing to wreck the planet to such an extent that people need to buy themselves an escape. Even here there is the problem that the inability of capitalism to see or plan ahead is what makes them so effective at polluting - and terraforming requires very serious planning, if it can ever work at all that is.
Even when capitalism had a global superpower behind it, it seemed to bogged down by its own shallow goals and could never really produce the goods. If you look at the contrast between the goals of the two respective programmes (US vs USSR) then this is borne out effectively.
For example, even to a child without the benefit of hindsight, I could never see the point of going to the moon, unless you're engaged in pointless showboating.
It seemed to me that the US reacted to the fact that the USSR had gotten the satellite into space, the first man into space etc and needed a publicity stunt to try and convince the public that they were keeping up.
While the US went on to quietly forget about the moon and tried to get somewhere with the increasingly disastrous shuttle, the Russians pushed ahead with their space station Mir, which was by all accounts a huge success.