MELVILL, RUTAN TALK ABOUT THE SUCCESSFUL TRIP TO SPACE Civilian astronaut Mike Melvill vertically rolled his way to space on Wednesday. Dropped from the mothership above Mojave, California, Melvill lit the rocket on Burt Rutan's "SpaceShipOne." But less than a minute later, as the aircraft was on its vertical ascent, its wings started to rock. It did more than 20 vertical rolls before reaching an unofficial altitude of 337,500 feet. So what happened? How do you train to fly something like that? And what's the airframe life of the spacecraft? Get the answers to these and more questions in our special report on AOPA Online; and listen to Melvill and Rutan talk about the endeavor in their own words ( http://www.aopa.org/members/040930rutan.html ). Also, for those heading to AOPA Expo in Long Beach, California, Melvill will be the featured speaker at the opening luncheon on October 21. For more on Expo, see ( http://www.aopa.org/expo/).
SPACE PRIZE OFFERED FOR FIRST ORBIT Now that Burt Rutan has shown that his rocket, funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, can make suborbital flights, and he is well on his way to winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize, space entrepreneurs are looking to the next challenge: orbital flight. Budget Suites of America mogul Robert Bigelow plans to fund half of what he calls "America's Space Prize," a $50 million award to the first team building a craft that can put five to seven people in orbit. News of the award was first reported by "Aviation Week & Space Technology." Bigelow wants to lease to the government inflatable space station modules made by another of his companies, Bigelow Aerospace. And Virgin Group chief Richard Branson hopes to have cornered the suborbital tourism industry by signing an agreement with Allen's company, Mojave Aerospace Ventures, to build more spacecraft similar to "SpaceShipOne" and rocket the public to the edge of space at a cost of $190,000 per person. Virgin Galactic would open for business in 2005 and start flights in 2007. _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
