The late, great futurist and humorist Douglas Adams once described the vastness of the universe like this: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." So, compared to the vastness of space, a piddling 408 feet doesn't seem like a big deal.
But 408 feet assumed a cosmic-scale importance this Monday, when test pilot Mike Melvill rode SpaceShipOne -- a privately funded, designed and constructed rocket plane -- to an altitude of 328,491 feet -- 408 feet above the internationally recognized boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and space. By a matter of 408 feet, Melvill became the first person in history to rocket beyond our world without the sponsorship of a government.
Melvill's flight is first and foremost a remarkable personal milestone for the 63- year-old test pilot. "Looking at the Earth up there, you know, it's almost a religious experience," Melvill told CNN. "It's an awesome thing to see. You can see the curvature of the Earth." Upon landing, officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration presented Melvill with the first-ever commercial astronaut pilot's wings.
The flight did not go without incident. Melvill encountered some difficulties controlling the ship, which rolled several times during its supersonic flight before he switched to back-up controls. But the flight was ultimately successful, and in the inherently risky business of space travel, that success is noteworthy.
Beyond being a private achievement for Melvill and aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, whose company designed and built SpaceShipOne, Monday's flight may also mark the beginning of a larger shift in the public-private balance of space activities. While one flight means little, pursuant and consistent flights by SpaceShipOne or one of the other private attempts at a reusable space plane would be a strong signal that the spirit of innovation and technical daring-do -- once the hallmark of the Apollo project and NASA's early history -- has changed hands and now belongs to the private sector.
It ought to be noted that government-funded and private space missions are not directly comparable. After all, they have different capabilities and serve different ends. SpaceShipOne flies only to the nearest reaches of space and can carry three people; NASA's Saturn V took astronauts to the moon, and the space shuttle ferries a crew of seven and a vast payload of experiments.
Yet other, more financial comparisons are unavoidable. While space shuttle missions run upwards of a $250 million, SpaceShipOne was constructed for a mere $20 million, and Rutan's company has suggested that the eventual price of a ticket to space might be as low as $30,000 a ride. Dennis Tito, the world's first "space tourist," had to pay the Russian government $20 million -- SpaceShipOne's construction cost -- for his brief stay aboard the International Space Station.
In the near future, spaceflight -- a trophy that America, the former USSR, and most recently China spent billions to claim -- may be available to ordinary citizens for the price of a car. As Pattie Grace Smith of the FAA told reporters: "We have opened the frontier of human space flight. It's a major step ushering in a new era of low-cost space flight." While this development doesn't signal the end of an era of government-funded space exploration, it does signal a coming cohabitation of public and private interests in space.
NASA has often called upon the exploration of the Americas as an analogy to the exploration of space. Extending that parallel a bit more, it's worth noting that early European exploration was conducted under the banners of states and funded by monarchs, but was followed by waves of private voyages and voyagers. Monday's special 408 feet may have opened the door for a similar progression in the new, celestial frontier.
