SpaceShipOne, model airplane

Jeff Foust has some excellent commentary on yesterday's second anniversary of SpaceShipOne's first commercial spaceflight.

Meanwhile, I've been learning about the world's first homebuilt spaceship's roots in model airplanes. Burt Rutan, the ship's designer, has spoken of finding his best workers for SpaceShipTwo from among the ranks of model airplane builders rather from the traditional aerospace industry, and no wonder.

SpaceShipOne can trace a direct line of ancestry from the model airplanes Rutan built as a grade-schooler in the 1950s. In fact the very name of Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, comes from the concept of building scale models of bigger airplanes out of composites made of fiberglass and other high-strength cloth and glue--materials dedicated amateurs used to build Rutan's first airplane designs in their garages.

No, as Jeff sadly points out in his commentary, you still can't fly an X Prize class ship into space. But you can fly its tiny cousins, and a hell of a lot more cheaply.

Check out Dan Kreigh's WildRC.com for some eye-popping videos of these little machines whirling around in the Scaled hangar in Mojave California, and then if you're inspired, pick one up for just a couple hundred bucks.

Kreigh is a structural analyst at Scaled. Along with other work on SpaceShipOne, he designed and applied the spray-of-stars pattern on the spaceship's nose. And he builds and sells radio controlled model airplanes of the same carbon fiber construction as the spaceship itself. Kreigh reports, however, that the one-of-a-kind model of SpaceShipOne pictured above is not for sale.

Bigelow on COTS

Receiving money from NASA's new Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program will disqualify a company from winning Robert Bigelow's America's Space Prize, Bigelow confirmed for me yesterday.

Under COTS, NASA has allocated $500 million to be spent over five years to help entrepreneurial space companies develop spaceships that can send crew and/or cargo to the International Space Station. The space agency is expected to select companies to receive the first installment of this money by summer's end.

Robert Bigelow also has a vested interest in helping private enterprise reach orbit; he expects to launch the first commercial space station, now under development in North Las Vegas, by 2012.

But he doesn't have a way to get people and supplies there, which is why he launched his $50 million America's Space Prize in 2004 for the first private spaceship capable of docking with an orbital outpost.

America's Space Prize is not compatible with COTS, however. "One of the conditions of that was that federal money would not be allowed into that program," Bigelow told me of his prize. And that includes COTS money. "I still think that rule helps to level the playing field."