align=”left” width=”315″ height=”237″ /> Wow! Burt Rutan and his team
at Scaled Composites complete their
2nd flight to space and win the X
Prize this morning!

They completed their first flight on Thursday, September
30th. And today they completed the required second flight within the
required two weeks.

Also note, today is the 47th anniversary of the
Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik.

align=”left” width=”240″ height=”179″ />Burt Rutan is one
of the people I consider a hero and would really like to meet. He has
designed and built some amazing aircraft. What’s really amazing is all
his aircraft have been sub-sonic. SpaceShipOne is his first creation
which goes faster than Mach 1. In fact, it reaches Mach 3+ going
straight up! SpaceShipOne also is designed as simple as possible. It’s
flight controls are not the fancy fly-by-wire but the simple cable and
pulley type. The last aircraft to fly faster than the speed of sound
with a cable and pulley setup is said to be the Bell X-1 piloted by
Chuck Yeager. This, to me, means there’s some serious engineering going
on to allow SpaceShipOne to fly with this configuration. Also pretty
neat is the feather system Rutan designed into SpaceShipOne. It allows
the aircraft (or is it a space craft?) to tumble back into the
atmosphere without much stress on the airframe or pilot input (its been
said the pilot can sit back and not touch a thing and it’ll re-enter the
atmosphere on its own). To me, that’s engineering and creativity at work.

Wow!