In all seriousness, I watched "Black Sky" last night, about Rutan and his crew. Hats off to all of them, extremely impressive work.
I saw Black Sky last night as well and it was awesome.
Unfortunately, I missed the first 45 minutes so I missed the part about them losing a pilot? They said the name but I forgot who it was but they showed his widow on one of the test flight. Did they say who it was and how he died?
Thanks.
I caught that too! Excellent documentary on their efforts and the men behind Rutan (the test pilots were awesome [can you say Cajones!]; and the geeky math-nerd engineer doing flight trajectories etc. 'on-the-fly' was great too).
All in all, well worth the 2 hours invested.
...I once got a lizard strapped to a model rocket that high......
I'm a rocket engineer too. My early efforts circa 1957/58 were all failures.
When i got Esees motors I could really get things up.
Alas, the passion waned. My studies came to an end.
Kudos especially to the emphasis on genuine space exploration well outside of low earth orbit.
I am a huge supporter of the space program but have lamented the emphasis on Low Earth Orbit missions that have dominated our space program for the last 30 years or so, as the moon missions were phased out.