zooom!
Got up "early" this morning to watch the X-prize webcast of the Space Ship 1 mission. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to get out there for it, but the webcast apparently had better camera views than people on the ground did - they switched from White Night's camera to the SS1 Wing Camera right after launch, and had shots from a radar-tracking telescope at Edwards, as well as a number of other sources during the exercise.
It will be interesting to see what the results of the analysis of the "handling anomoly" during the boost phase turn out to be - apparently Melvill was really hanging on, at that point, and pulled through simply by being a damn good pilot. (The background on him during the early part of the webcast was interesting - not only did he build his own EZ Jet (which is how he met Rutan in the first place) but he was one of the test pilots on Voyager -- he seems to have flown more of the "really different" aircraft than anybody else...)
Overall a good show, fun to watch, time to start saving up (or at least hoping this startup "pops" well :-) for a VSS Enterprise flight :-)
It will be interesting to see what the results of the analysis of the "handling anomoly" during the boost phase turn out to be - apparently Melvill was really hanging on, at that point, and pulled through simply by being a damn good pilot. (The background on him during the early part of the webcast was interesting - not only did he build his own EZ Jet (which is how he met Rutan in the first place) but he was one of the test pilots on Voyager -- he seems to have flown more of the "really different" aircraft than anybody else...)
Overall a good show, fun to watch, time to start saving up (or at least hoping this startup "pops" well :-) for a VSS Enterprise flight :-)