Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [149]
Backed by financier and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, Burt’s efforts were looking very promising for winning the prize. But on this occasion they still had a few kinks to work out. As a crowd of hundreds gathered in the area surrounding the hot desert landing strip, we all gazed up as the graceful White Knight took flight with SpaceShipOne fastened securely to its fuselage. After separation, Mike Melvill, the sixty-three-year-old test pilot, continued speeding upward, followed by a thick white contrail that made it easier to be tracked by the naked eye. Suddenly the spacecraft went out of control into a roll, as the contrail now turned into a series of curlicues. With a great deal of skill, and a bit of luck, Mike was able to keep the roll symmetrical until the rocket burned out, and then fully regained control to make it back for a successful and safe landing. Averting a potential disaster, both he and the craft escaped injury.
We all congratulated the pilot for the great recovery, even though he had failed to achieve suborbital distance. In the crowd I ran into my friend, Richard Branson, flamboyant founder and CEO of Virgin Galactic, who was on hand for the flight. Richard is an English billionaire with more than 300 companies under his Virgin logo. He has a knack for building businesses, so I was glad when he expressed interest in suborbital space tourism. He was considering an association between Virgin and SpaceShipOne to adapt the technology for a fleet of suborbital craft. By the time SpaceShipOne won the X PRIZE, it bore a Virgin logo. Richard was never one to miss a good opportunity to market and promote his companies.
On September 29, 2004, Mike Melvill became the first civilian pilot to fly into suborbital space, successfully qualifying SpaceShipOne for the first round of the two requisite X PRIZE flights. To celebrate en route in his brief moments of weightlessness, he released a bag of M&Ms that floated around the cabin in a colorful display. I wasn’t able to be there in person for this first, but was thrilled with the outcome. Days later, on October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne made its second qualifying flight to win the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE, as it was now called, since the prize was primarily funded by the Ansaris, a wealthy entrepreneurial Iranian family from Texas. Anousheh Ansari became so enamored with space that she eventually flew as the first female space tourist, traveling to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz rocket in September 2006.
In November, Lois and I went to London for a meeting with Virgin Galactic’s Stephen Attenborough, Alex Tai, and others at their Kensington offices, to discuss a potential collaboration between Virgin and my ShareSpace Foundation. I knew that Richard wanted to design his own spacecraft for suborbital tourism and hoped to be operating regular flights by 2008. That date has since been revised, but there is little doubt that the world will see Virgin Galactic taking people on suborbital rides in the near future.
While my friends were developing fresh ideas for making suborbital travel feasible, safe, and profitable, I focused my attention on my Star-Booster family of rockets and spacecraft that could carry larger numbers of passengers into orbital space with each trip.
There are enormous differences between launching a suborbital craft and launching an orbital craft. One of the easiest ways to understand the relative degree of difficulty is the speed needed in both instances. A suborbital craft may top out at about 2,500 miles per hour to perform the sixty-two-mile lob to the edge of space, whereas the thrust and speed required to take a vehicle into orbit is exponentially greater, on the order of 17,500 miles per hour to reach about 220 miles above the Earth and sustain ninety-minute orbits encircling the entire globe. It’s a whole different ball game.
NASA’s missions were never intended