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In the beginning… The world’s first commercial spaceship was unveiled and christened today at Mojave. I will post more when I have slept and caught my flight home, but here is just one photo of the very full day of activities. I did not have as much time as Rand Simberg to get articles out due the large number of hats I was wearing today. I was also not official press although I could have slipped in as most of the annointed press knew me and would have said nothing
In any case, I will have more to say and I have hundreds of photos. Here is just one.
Christening of the VSS Enterprise.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
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Good stuff – thanks for the update.
Or you could take a supersonic trip across the Atlantic in a Concorde… oh, wait, you could do that when I was a kid…
Great picture.
Any word on whether they have made any progress figuring out what caused the propulsion accident?
They did say that they will not fly until they know what happened.
Amazing.
Almost thirty years ago I read Robert Heinlein’s classic, The Man Who Sold the Moon. At the time its central idea – private corporations building spaceships and going to the Moon and beyond – seemed utterly implausible. After all, Wasn’t space exploration the preserve of governments? Now it looks like history is going to prove Heinlein right. Only instead of Delos D. Harriman, we have Sir Richard Branson.
And it would seem that when Gene Roddenberry named his starship, he inexplicably omitted a word: it should have been the USS Private Enterprise!
I hope you’ve thawed out, Dale- I saw the lightshow from a distance on my way home from the grocery store, and was never so glad NOT to have an invitation. Brrrrr!
O.K., this looks vaguely like the Shuttle from Star Trek, so does it take you to the Mother Ship? (I presume that teleportation will be Sir Branson’s next project)
Doug: I could not even feel the button on my camera to snap the photos. I just told my hand to move and hoped it was doing what I told it to do.
That said, wait until I get a chance to do my full article.
Johnny, go ahead and take a trip in the Concorde. Let me know how that works out.
Billions of dollars invested by multiple governments, for a plane that never came close to making money but was kept on taxpayer-funded life support for three decades as a show of prestige.
Not a good comparison with a privately funded suborbital spaceship, which will sink or swim in private funds, not those provided by me and others compelled to pay for governmental stasis.