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*I haven't seen this posted previously. Is new from space.com's "Astronotes" (updated column format, must copy and paste):
November 22
SpaceShipOne: Time Magazine's Invention of the Year
Time magazine has picked SpaceShipOne as the invention of the year. Out on newsstands this week, the magazine salutes the privately-built rocket plane as being ingenious in design and an example of “entrepreneurial moxie.”
Led by maverick aerospace designer, Burt Rutan, SpaceShipOne was the product of his firm, Scaled Composites of Mojave, California.
Time put the craft in the number one slot, making note of why it deserved top billing:
“For solving the problems of suborbital flight and re-entry with ingenious design, for boldly going where NASA now fears to tread and returning without a scratch, but most of all for reigniting the moon-shot-era dream of zero-gravity for everyone, SpaceShipOne is Time’s Coolest Invention of 2004."
SpaceShipOne winged its way over other selected inventions, among them JVC’s J4 humanoid-like robot; 3M Novec 1230, a fire protection fluid; Segway’s prototype Centaur, a four-wheel sit-on-it scooter; and an Intel-invented wireless technology surfboard that includes a built-in webcam.
-Leonard David
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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But the real plus out of this is that all seem to be persueing the goal thou it has been won and that congress has finally passed legislation with regards to sub orbit flights.
But the arguments for or against seemed to dwell on whether it is an air ship or a space ship for how we should value risk and who should be responsive to it.
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I bought a copy of this magazine yesterday at a newsstand. It's actually pretty good and should do a good job at making people aware of what Rutan has done for the Alt. space community. The rest of the magazine, typically, was a pretty big dissapointment.
It's been a long time since I've seen a Time magazine so I wasn't quite shure what to expect, but like all popular magazines it shows the weird priorities most people have. Big huge section at the begining on politics, even bigger huge section at the end on entertainment, and a little sliver on an article that did a very poor job at explaining cosmology and the multiverse theory. There's such an increadible, vibrant, beautiful universe out there and the vast majority of people couldn't care less about it. IMHO, it's really a tradgedy that the majority of people go through life worrying about what the next pop album will be like and try to ignore every new development in science as possible, then go on to say that ignorance is bliss. Clearly the opposite is true.
A mind is like a parachute- it works best when open.
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In my opinion the real value of SS1 was it gave alot of legitimacy to AltSpace start ups. How much you can scale up the air launch technology is debatable, but now you can at least talk about space start ups and without (as many) laughs and snickers in the room.
Although I can already imagine SS3 riding between a cattermaran 777 with four GE90s, now that would be a very Rutan esque flying machine.
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Will with the most recent delay on the Canadian DaVinci rocket one can only hope that they get their's flight right and that SpaceShip One will not be alone with regards to completing the xprize sub orbital requirement. Also why should SpaceShip Ones flights stop? Should they not be pushing the ship to its limits, adapting it by adding sensors and trying to increase the peak of flight?
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Heres]http://www.space.com/news/lindbergh_auction_041202.html]Here's your chance --
*--to own a bit of space history.
Mad Grad Student: There's such an increadible, vibrant, beautiful universe out there and the vast majority of people couldn't care less about it. IMHO, it's really a tradgedy that the majority of people go through life worrying about what the next pop album will be like and try to ignore every new development in science as possible, then go on to say that ignorance is bliss. Clearly the opposite is true.
*Yep. And that realization is always a difficult one, regardless of one's age. I feel just as stymied about it at 39 as I did at 15, when I was your age. My husband tends to be that way. I show him marvels and wonders via this computer, related to astronomy and space exploration; a glimmer of interest, sometimes a grunt of faint interest. ::sigh::
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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Now just think how much more these sculptors would sell for if they were authentic lunar or mars materials...
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