Will They Make It?

I've been following the Paul Allen sponsored Burt Rutan managed SpaceShipOne project for the past couple years. Ever since I heard about the X Prize. For those of you who don't know, the X Prize offers $10 million dollars to the first private group of individuals to reach suborbit and then repeat that within 2 weeks.

I looked at the field and the group that had the best chance, in my mind, of taking the prize was the Scaled Composites team out of the Mojave desert in California. Then today CNN announced Burt's team is planning the first suborbital flight on the 21st of this month. If you have followed Burt Rutan at all you know that he doesn't make announcements of flights. And he doesn't like putting his pilots' lives in danger so he's not going to make an announcement just because someone's pressuring him to do so (at least I hope).

One cool thing about Burt is the fact he doesn't use any wind tunnels for testing his designs. If you take a look at some of his aircraft designs with that fact in mind you'll be amazed. This guy's truly gifted and I believe this will earn him and his team the respect they deserve outside of the aircraft community.

Join with me in wishing Burt and the Scaled Composites SpaceCraftOne team luck on their scheduled launch into suborbit!

Good luck guys!