SpaceShipOne at Wright-Patterson AFB

I was lucky to see SpaceShipOne, the world's first commercial space ship, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio after it won the first X Prize for first commercial space flight. It had left the Airventure in Oshkosh, WI and was staying the night in Dayton, Ohio before completing its last flight to the "graveyard", the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. The White Knight, the plane that carried SS1, was needed back at Mohave Spaceport for SpaceShipTwo reasons. These commercial spaceplanes will soon carry paying members of the public in a fledgling industry called space tourism, a division of commercial space (using space for commercial and profitable reasons).

I took these pictures as a sort of animated, step-by-step sequence hoping one day to put them together fast enough to make it look like it was moving as I saw it. Something close to that is available on the Ohio Chapter of the Mars Society website. The first private astronaut, Mike Melvill, flew SpaceShipOne in on the White Knight and gave an impromptu speech in the hanger. He did not know a small crowd of us had gathered to see him and his spaceplane. A few hours after landing, he gave a speech at the Dayton Engineer's Club about his X Prize flight, the designs and concepts of Rutan's spaceplane, and the processes he went through, showing slides along the way. For anyone saying there's never been a spaceship at Wright-Patt (Hanger 18), here's proof that one "spaceship" - spacePLANE - made it in. :-)

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