Burt and Paul...

Before I came in this morning, I watched the second launch of Burt Rutan's and Paul Allen's (well, Scaled Composite's, really...) SpaceShip One, in pursuit of the Ansari X Prize. All appearances are that they have won, but it's not official until the pilot survives 24 hours (by international aeronautical federation rules).

I still have scrapbooks that I made during the early Apollo flights in 1968 (I'm not *that* old - I was 4 at the time), so space has been in my blood for a long time. But I've felt for a long time that NASA lost its way after Apollo. Shuttle was designed more to keep NASA centers open and be politically feasible than to be the next step into space.

Today, I think I saw what is likely to be the next step, with technology that comes more out of the aeronautical world than the space world, and comes from a small group of dedicated people working together rather than a large army. There are some obvious parallels there between space and software development that I won't go into right now.

As soon as I heard that Scaled was going for the X Prize, I knew they would be the one to win, as whenever Burt Rutan gets in the game, he's always a front runner. From the globe-circling Voyager to the Beech Starship, his designs have always had innovative solutions.

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 04, 2004
  If one needs billions from a gov't to do something, is not "politically feasible" so much the norm as to be reality?
• Anonymous
  October 04, 2004
  I was pretty sure somebody would comment on that, since I didn't really write that much.
  
  Since NASA decided it wanted to keep all the centers open, it needed a big project. But it had to be a cheap project to be politically feasible, so they took a project that was pretty good, traded a cheaper construction cost for drastically higher operational costs, and over-promised all around.
  
  They also devolved into "study-itis", where you spend so much money studying what you should do that you don't have enough money left to do it.