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Old 04-06-2004, 02:15   #78
jumpermax
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Iscritto dal: Mar 2001
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allora siamo vicini al primo volo commerciale in orbita? giugno sarà un mese memorabile per la ricerca spaziale... Cassini su Saturno e questo!

Quote:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...ixnewstop.html
Space is the final frontier for cheap flights
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 03/06/2004)

Plans to launch a new era of space exploration with the first privately-funded manned space flight were announced yesterday.

If the organisers are successful, they believe a test flight this month will mark a giant leap, opening up the final frontier to private enterprise and heralding much easier access to space for future generations.
White Knight, the mothership, with SpaceShipOne slung underneath

The pilot, who is yet to be announced, will become the first person to earn astronaut wings in a non-government-sponsored craft and the first civilian to fly a spaceship out of the atmosphere.

For three minutes the pilot will become an astronaut: he will be weightless and see a black sky and thin blue atmospheric line on the horizon.

The rocket plane, called SpaceShipOne and developed by Scaled Composites, will set off at 6.30am on June 21 in California - if all goes to plan and if the weather permits.

The organisers are inviting the public to view, up close, the take-off and landing as well as the overhead rocket boost into space.

A mothership, White Knight, will take off with SpaceShipOne slung underneath. An hour later, after climbing to about 50,000 feet just east of Mojave, White Knight will release the spaceship.

The spaceship pilot then fires his rocket motor for about 80 seconds, reaching Mach 3 in a vertical climb and encountering G-forces up to four times the gravity of Earth. SpaceShipOne will then coast to its goal of a sub-orbital flight 62 miles above the Mojave Civilian Aerospace Test Centre, a commercial airport in the California desert, before falling back to Earth.

In sub-orbital flights the mission does not reach the speeds needed to sustain continuous orbiting of Earth.

The view from such a flight is similar to being in orbit, but the cost and risks are far less.

After three minutes as an astronaut the pilot will put the craft's wing and tail into a high-drag configuration that will slow the spaceship in the upper atmosphere and automatically align it along the flight path. On re-entry, he will reconfigure the craft back to a glider and spend 15 to 20 minutes gliding back to Earth, touching down like an airplane on the same runway from which he took off.

The project's organisers, the investor and philanthropist Paul G Allen and the aviation legend Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites, say the flights will encourage others to "usher in a new, low-cost era in space travel".


http://www.betterhumans.com/News/new...D=2004-06-03-5
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