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Posted on 06/20/2004 6:06:19 PM PDT by KevinDavis
I thought this will be the official live thread of the historic launch of Spaceship One. Since this will happen while I'm at work, I thought I give a live thread an eary start..
Since they have replicators, they don't even have to grow their food. Star Trek always grated on me because they never considered the implications of the technology they were wielding.
In one of my Star Trek nerd books, it talks about the holodeck and replicators in TNG, and says one of the dilemnas they had to work around was that they could potentially be used to bring back the dead to life.
One of the funny scenes in the new Enterprise series was when Archer and T'Pal are on Earth and Archer purposely orders a fast food hamburger.
in space and in orbit = spaceflight
Best Riker-related line I've heard (from a STTNG parody):
(a voice that sounded exactly like Patrick Stewart): "Numbah One ... put 'it' away, wash your hands, and join me on the bridge!"
That's the ticket!
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One of the head guys on this project is the son of one of my elementary school teacher's.
My town will be paying close attention tomorrow, that's for sure.
> It is a suborbital flight, ...
I'd be inclined to call it a nearly vertical ballistic
flight outside the atmosphere, but Scaled itself calls
it "suborbital", so I'll leave it at that.
> and the pilot will become a for real astronaut.
And the requirement "astronaut" is simply altitude.
Straight up and straight down suffices. Are not some
of the X-prize entrants balloons with rockets?
Other threads here have shown that a lot of people think
SS1 is a real orbital craft, needing only to burn more
rubber (so to speak) to get into orbit. My impression is
that it could not survive an orbital re-entry (i.e. it
can't dump the heat energy from both a real orbital
gravity well and bleeding off 17Kmph orbital velocity).
Has Scaled said anything about how much excess capability
the system has? I assume it has a bit of margin over what
the X-prize requires, but just a bit, and that going
substantially higher (or into orbit) would require a
completely different craft. This is not like Shep's Merc
capsule, needing just more boost to go around the world.
And if Scaled has a real orbital craft in work, we won't
hear about it until they can't keep it secret any longer.
bookmark bump
MSNBC.com plans to offer a live webcast.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/SS1_guide_040618.html
for obvious reasons. 
Art Bell just said that all of the networks are heading over to Mojave cover this.
A so I can find the thread tomorrow bump....
I meant this live thread is about 13 hours prior.
I live here. The wind picks up in the afternoons.
Okay, I'm working mid shift and won't be home in time to watch the flight, so I'm here...
Screen grabs welcome ;-)
yum
There needs to be a new contest... one that propels a man made object to relativistic speeds....say .10c and beyond(about 18600 miles a second or 67 million miles an hour).
You think about 2 billion dollars would motivate a few engineers and physicists?
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