On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 01:06:23 -0400, Matt Whiting
wrote:


No, I didn't miss it and I doubt the others did either. The comparison
was time delta of the first GOVERNMENT sponsored flight of a spacecraft
to the first private one. If the same timescale was applied to
conventional airplanes, you would be comparing the first GOVERNMENT
sponsored flight of a conventional airplane to the first private one.
Backing 40 years off of 1943 yields 1903, which is NOT when the first
GOVERNMENT sponsored airplane flew successfully, so the comparison is
completely invalid.

The purpose of the comparison was merely to illustrate the time spans
involved, not to try to contrast the difference between government vs.
private efforts. A less controversial comparison would have been along the
lines of "...it was as if no else other than the Wright brothers had been
technically capable of building an airplane until 1943."

Rutan's achievement is tremendous, but let's not forget, he's standing on
the shoulders of giants. SpaceShipOne's success is due to Rutan's
brilliant combining of today's cutting-edge technology. He probably has
more computing power on his desktop than NASA had in 1960. There wasn't
any wind-tunnel testing done on SpaceShipOne; it was all done on a
computer.

Yet, barely ten years ago, the first flight of an improved launch vehicle
failed because the aerodynamic models used weren't accurate enough. That
company trusted the computer model and didn't do any wind tunnel testing.
The launch vehicle and satellite end up in the drink. Oops.

Burt Rutan was fully aware of this instance...after all, his company built
part of that rocket's structure (which was in *no* way involved in the
failure). Yet, in ten short years, modeling capabilities have improved to
the point where he felt confident in risking a manned flight on
computational data only.

Rutan did one heck of a job, but some folks in this newsgroup have used it
as an excuse to sneer at the people who developed some of the technologies
that made it possible. If suborbital space flight was so doggone easy, the
first private space launch would have been four years after the X-15, not
forty.

Ron Wanttaja