The reaction upon hearing the SpaceShip One pilot’s answer to Diamandis’ question: “With your rocket going through 29 rolls at Mach 3 climbing vertically, what was going through your mind? Why didn’t you bail out?”
Answer: “Well, I’m a shareholder in Scaled Composites.”
In introducing two SpaceShipOne astronauts, Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie, Diamandis marvelled at the courage, and maybe a bit of craziness, it takes to be a test pilot: “You guys actually voluntarily got into a rocket and lit the fuse.”
During the second flight on Sept. 29, 2004, SpaceShipOne went into a dizzying spin. “It was an awful moment,” Melvill recalled. “I was scared to death.” But he got the vehicle under control and broke the space barrier, setting up the third and crucial spaceflight for fellow test pilot Brian Binnie on Oct. 4. That date also marked the anniversary of Russia’s Sputnik 1 launch, which kicked off the first Space Age in 1957.
On another flight, Melvill lost the avionics display, which helps the pilot manage the ship’s complex systems.
“It was going straight up. It looked to me like everything was OK. The thing went black. I couldn’t see where I was going. The FAA rules say that I should abort if the displays fail, but Burt Rutan and I thought that we should not abort in any case if we are heading straight up. But I could look out the window, which is normally how I fly anyway. Because I didn’t have to watch the avionics display, I watched the beauty of the sky go from blue to dark blue to purple to black.”
I was sitting right by the FAA Director who approved these suborbital flights, and I noticed subtle “no” and then “yes” nods of the head. =)
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