Word: melville
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The reception was muted. Rutan was widely respected in the experimental-plane-building industry, having designed Voyager, the first aircraft to make it around the world nonstop without refueling, which his brother Dick helped fly into the record books in 1986. But the design for SpaceShipOne inspired near universal derision...
SpaceShipOne's lift-off is inventive too. The vehicle is carried aloft tethered to the belly of a futuristic cargo plane dubbed White Knight, which takes off effortlessly and then climbs in circles of ever increasing altitude for an hour. Just when you think White Knight has disappeared from sight...
But beginning around 158,000 ft., well before SpaceShipOne's apogee, where the sky goes black and you can see the curvature of the earth, Melvill and fellow test pilot Brian Binnie each had a good four minutes of weightlessness with nothing to do. Both took digital-camera snapshots through...
No one ever said flying into space was easy, especially if you build your rocket yourself. SPACESHIPONE, designed by Burt Rutan and piloted by Michael Melvill, 63, made such a trip last week, climbing 64 miles above the Mojave Desert, with some scary corkscrewing along the way. The flight is...
The flight of SpaceShipOne--brainchild of aerospace whiz Burt Rutan and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen--was hailed as a giant leap toward opening space flight to tourists. Indeed, the craft was impressively small and lightweight (about the size of an SUV) and relatively cheap (about $20 million, compared with...