Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - First privately funded rocket breaks through earth's atmosphere

Rodney · 10-04-2004, 08:36 PM

The thing that really gets me about this project is that it's the way people thought space travel would happen, 60 and 70 years ago. The same story must have been written 1000 times in the old science fiction pulps of the '30s and '40s: Some wild-eyed professor would invent a speical rocket motor or rocket fuel and dream of going to orbit. He'd catch the interest of a visionary industrialist with a wild streak and, with a small band of dedicated mechanics and engineers, would build a rocket that would take mankind into space against all odds.

Well, with the national space programs of the '50s and '60s we all got convinced that space travel could never happen that way. Individuals could never do it; only vast bureaucracies funded by government could do what was necessary to get man into space. Individual initiative and creativity was behind the point; space travel was all about decisions made between bureaucratic committees and carried out by vast aerospace companies under heavy bureaucratic control. Space travel was too complicated for anything else to work.

That route to space travel gradually ground to a halt under the weight of its own bureaucracy, both here and in Russia. And once in a while I'd ask myself, where are the crazy billionaires when we need them? Where are the wild-eyed, big-dreaming maverick rocket scientists?

And that's why I had tears in my eyes when SpaceshipOne launched today. There was a crazy billionaire out there after all, willing to spend money on a big dream that might never turn a profit -- although it will. And there was a maverick airplane designer and his small band of dedicated compatriots who found an ingenious way to get into space on the cheap that no aerospace bureaucracy would ever dare. And you know, if the crazy billionaires and the maverick technologists are all out there after all, like the pulp writers used to think they were -- maybe _anything_ is possible.

10-04-2004, 08:36 PM	#78 (permalink)
Rodney Observant Ruminant Location: Rich Wannabe Hippie Town	The thing that really gets me about this project is that it's the way people thought space travel would happen, 60 and 70 years ago. The same story must have been written 1000 times in the old science fiction pulps of the '30s and '40s: Some wild-eyed professor would invent a speical rocket motor or rocket fuel and dream of going to orbit. He'd catch the interest of a visionary industrialist with a wild streak and, with a small band of dedicated mechanics and engineers, would build a rocket that would take mankind into space against all odds. Well, with the national space programs of the '50s and '60s we all got convinced that space travel could never happen that way. Individuals could never do it; only vast bureaucracies funded by government could do what was necessary to get man into space. Individual initiative and creativity was behind the point; space travel was all about decisions made between bureaucratic committees and carried out by vast aerospace companies under heavy bureaucratic control. Space travel was too complicated for anything else to work. That route to space travel gradually ground to a halt under the weight of its own bureaucracy, both here and in Russia. And once in a while I'd ask myself, where are the crazy billionaires when we need them? Where are the wild-eyed, big-dreaming maverick rocket scientists? And that's why I had tears in my eyes when SpaceshipOne launched today. There was a crazy billionaire out there after all, willing to spend money on a big dream that might never turn a profit -- although it will. And there was a maverick airplane designer and his small band of dedicated compatriots who found an ingenious way to get into space on the cheap that no aerospace bureaucracy would ever dare. And you know, if the crazy billionaires and the maverick technologists are all out there after all, like the pulp writers used to think they were -- maybe _anything_ is possible.