Unit 2 The new space race
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A plan to build the world's first airport for launching commercial spacecraft in New Mexico is the latest development in the new space race, a race among private companies and billionaire entrepreneurs to carry paying pasngers into space and to kick-start a new industry, astro tourism.
abstentionThe man who is leading the race may not be familiar to you, but to astronauts, pilots, and aeronautical engineers – basically to anyone who knows anything about aircraft design – Burt Rutan is a legend, an aeronautical engineer who latest aircraft is the world's first private spaceship. As he told 60 Minutesdepartment怎么读 correspondent Ed Bradley when he first met him a little over a year ago, if his idea flies, someday space travel may be cheap enough and safe enough for ordinary people to go where only astronauts have gone before.
The White Knight is a rather unusual looking aircraft, built just for the purpo of carrying a rocket plane called SpaceShipOne, the first spacecraft built by private enterpri.
White Knight and SpaceShipOne are the latest creations of Burt Rutan. They're part of his dream to develop a commercial travel business in space.
"There will be a new industry. And we are just now in a beginning. I will predict that in 12 or 15 years, there will be tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people that fly, and e that black sky," says Rutan.
On June 21, 2004, White Knight took off from an airstrip in Mojave, Calif., carrying Rutan's spaceship. It took 63 minutes to reach the launch altitude of 47,000 feet. Once there, the White Knight crew prepared to relea the spaceship one.
The fierce acceleration slammed Mike Melvill, the pilot, back in his at. He put SpaceShipOne into a near vertical trajectory, until, as planned, the fuel ran out.
Still climbing like a spent bullet, Melvill hoped to gain as much altitude as possible to reach space before the ship began falling back to earth.
By the time the spaceship one reached the end of its climb, it was 22 miles off cour. Bu
t it had, just barely, reached an altitude of just over 62 miles — the internationally recognized boundary of space.
It was the news Rutan had been waiting for. Falling back to Earth from an altitude of 62 miles, SpaceShipOne's tilting wing, a revolutionary innovation called the feather, caud the rocket plane to position itlf for a relatively benign re-entry and turned the spaceship into a glider.
SpaceShipOne glided to a flawless landing before a crowd of thousands.如何练口语
"After that June flight, I felt like I was floating around and just once in a while touching the ground," remembers Rutan. "We had an operable space plane."
Rutan's "operable space plane" was built by a company with only 130 employees altarat a cost of just $25 million. He believes his success has ended the government's monopolycoffeebean on space travel, and opened it up to the ordinary citizen.
"I concluded that for affordable travel to happen, the little guy had to do it becau he had
the incentive for a business," says Rutan.
Does Rutan view this as a business venture or a technological challenge?
穷蹙"It's a technological challenge first. And it's a dream I had when I was 12," he says.
Rutan started building model airplanes when he was ven years old, in Dyenuba, Calif., where he grew up.
"I was fascinated by putting balsa wood together and e how it would fly," he remembers. "And when I started having the capability to do contests and actually win a trophyviaggio by making a better model, then I was hooked."客服中心英文
He's been hooked ever since. He designed his first airplane in 1968 and flew it four years later. Since then his airplanes have become known for their stunning looks, innovative design and technological sophistication.
Rutan began designing a spaceship nearly a decade ago, after tting up t up his own
aeronautical rearch and design firm. By the year 2000, he had turned his designs into models and was testing them outside his office.
"When I got to the point that I knew that I could make a safe spaceship that would fly a manned space mission -- when I say, 'I,' not the government, our little team -- 考研在线培训I told Paul Allen, 'I think we can do this.' And he immediately said, 'Go with it.'"
Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft and is one of the richest men in the world. His decision to pump $25 million into Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, was the vote of confidence that his engineers needed to proceed.
