SpaceShipTwo Unveiled

When I was a USAFA cadet I studied astronautical engineering, interned briefly at NASA JPL, and attended conferences about manned space travel to Mars. There was a lot of tension in the air in these contexts. My colleagues and I were the kind of people who peered through telescopes as kids, read science fiction by flashlight under our covers, and still dreamed about the possibility for man's pilgrimage to the stars. On the other hand, our national space program was in tatters. Nothing new was moving forward. Government spending on space was down. JPL had suffered a spectacular series of failures (such as the failure of the Mars Climate Observer because of a units conversion error). I was in my boss's office when he received a phone call canceling the program he'd spent the last year of his life designing. Ouch. My colleagues were demoralized and pessimistic. A lot of people seemed to believe that the space age so gloriously launched in the mid-20th century had been neglected and left to die.

I eventually came to a different conclusion: the space age hadn't yet begun. The Cold War space race was a false start, fueled by massive and unsustainable investments by the American and Soviet governments. A genuine space age would never begin until the private sector got involved and space became both profitable and sustainable. That's why I'm so excited to see so many signs that we are standing on the threshold of the real space age.

We crossed a major milestone when SpaceShipOne won the X-Prize in 2004. Now SpaceShipTwo is being rolled out--a spacecraft that, if all goes well, will soon begin ferrying paying passengers into space. Check it out.