To boldly go where no man without a government has ever gone before...

Yesterday saw the first manned flight of a privately-funded spacecraft:

"There were tense times during the sky-blistering flight of SpaceShipOne here this morning. Fighting control problems, pilot Mike Melvill wrestled with several anomalies that cut short a pre-planned altitude mark... However, the first non-governmental rocket ship did succeed in flying to the edge of space, earning the craft?s pilot, Mike Melvill, the first set of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)-issued commercial astronaut wings... At a post-landing press briefing, the 63-year old [pilot Mike] Melvill described a series of technical snags that haunted his record-setting flight..."

SpaceShipOne, built by a private comapany called Scaled Composites, was launched in mid-air by a mother ship, and went as high as 62.5 miles, or 100 kilometers, altitude at which "outer space" is determined to begin by international agreement. It then returned safely to its destination runway in the Mojave Desert. It engaged in what amounted to a "sub-orbital" flight, which means it went up and down, as opposed to around the planet. But it paves the way for further private manned missions, and eventual mass commerial travel.

There is a related story, with a fascinating history. In Canada, there is a craft under development known as the Canadian Arrow. Like the SS1, it is a three-man suborbital craft. But rather than being launched in mid-air from an aircraft, the Arrow takes off from the ground atop a two-stage rocket based on the old German V2 (also the model for the US Army Redstone, which launched the first Mercury space capsules into suborbital flight.

In the 1930s, the German Rocket Society began promoting the idea of high-altitude rocketry, based on the work of the American Robert Goddard. Rumanian-born Hermann Oberth wrote, in 1923, a highly prophetic book The Rocket into Interplanetary Space. The book enthralled many with dreams of space flight, including that precocious German teenager, Wernher von Braun, who read the book in 1925. Five years later, von Braun had joined Oberth and was assisting with rocket experiments. Von Braun was eventually hired by the Germans to develop the V1 and the V2, and was among those Germans who left their homeland after the war to assist the Americans, using the same models he developed for Germany, including the V2.

But even during this time, sights were set very high, up to and including the stars: "The V2 technology, although discarded in the 1950's, could have been used to launch mankind into space even earlier in our history. In fact, the British Interplanetary Society had produced plans (shown at left) for a V2 rocket to carry a man into space." I remember seeing pictures of such proposed models as a boy. There is much more to this history, which can be found in Germany's plans on the drawing board for sending multi-stage rockets to attack the USA from launch sites in Europe:

"It was intended that a pilot be included on the A9/A10 to guide the missile on its flight path to America. Once the A10 booster was jettisoned the A9 would continue to target with the aid of the pilot, who would use radio positioned guidance from German U-Boats positioned along the target path across the Atlantic. Once the pilot reached the intended target area, it was also planned that the pilot would leave the A9 (A4b) missile by means of an ejection seat, and parachute to an awaiting German Submarine or to be interned as a POW."