Author of SpaceShipOne Book to Visit Mojave
The author of a new book about the Ansari X Prize and SpaceShipOne will be in Mojave this Saturday, Nov. 19, to give a talk and sign books.
Julian Guthrie will be at the Mariah Country Inn & Suites at 1385 Highway 58 from 2 to 4 p.m. The inn is located next to the main entrance to the Mojave Air and Space Port.
Other participants in the event include: Brian Binnie and Mike Melvill, two Scaled Composites who flew SpaceShipOne to space; Matt Stinemetze, the program’s lead engineer; and aerodynamicist Bob Hoey.
Guthrie’s book chronicles the history of the $10 million prize, the development of SpaceShipOne, and the prize-winning suborbital flights of the first privately-built crewed space vehicle.
8 responses to “Author of SpaceShipOne Book to Visit Mojave”
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Doug, what are the chances you think she was paid to write this book. I first herd her on NPR, then her appearance on “The Space Show”, and she was so polly-annish when it comes to obvious short comings of this effort. It seems to me (I’ve not yet read it) not to be a piece of journalism, but rather a real fluff piece and the kind of bias that people complain about. If it’s a paid fluff piece, I can only think of the Ansari family with the resources needed to fund it, or do you think Diamondes paid for it?
Funny you should ask. You’re the second person to ask me that question in the past week. A friend of mine who read the book has the same suspicions. I really don’t know the answer.
I was pretty disappointed in her Space Show appearance. She said she could write about a certain period of time and had to end the book and couldn’t go into what’s happened the last 12 years. But she accepted the X Prize narrative about what the prize meant and all the positive impacts it had on the future. Anything else that didn’t fit that narrative was mostly ignored.
There is an epilogue that includes update on the people and companies in the book. The Virgin Galactic/SpaceShipTwo section runs about a page. She doesn’t mention the 2007 accident at all. And she gets key things wrong about the crash that set the program back more than 2 years.
She has Siebold opening his parachute; it actually opened automatically at 14K ft and jolted him awake. She also blames pilot error along, ignoring the NTSB’s finding that Scaled designed the system poorly. There are a lot of errors scattered through the book. In one scene, Diamandis is in the Milestones of Flight Gallery at the National Air and Space Museum looking up at a SR-71 hanging overhead.
These things are no more spaceships than an ME-163 Comet dropped from a learjet–and that’s all these useless toys are.
The General Lee was suborbital too–. I can jump about a foot high–that’s suborbital too.
Now a trawler sized 100 ton orbiter that was the shuttle up 220 nautical miles and in orbit? THAT’s a spaceSHIP.
But it’s SLS that everyone hates–instead of this suborbital garbage
The Space Ship 1, and Space Ship 2/Suborbital fiasco just goes to show me how vulnerable the wealthy and powerful are to being persuaded by advertising and hype. They suffer from the very social ills that advertisers key on to sell their products. Trump is a perfect example of high dollar and low intelligence combined with willful ignorance and a disdain for analysis. A lot of very wealthy people poured a lot of money into these enterprises. And notice how few want to pull out. It’s an amazing plumbing operation in plain view as to the human malfunctions of the rich and powerful.
We might get something out of that. If folks can encourage Trump to put, say, pro-space servicemen atop each brach of the Military. Pete Worden as USAF Secretary. Shake things up some and give Defense budgets to space advocates–the likes we haven’t seen since Korolyov
Unlikely. Trump is an emotional thinker, so I agree he can be lead so long as you know which emotional lines to pull. With him I think he’s along the lines of a Latin American strongman. Women, wealth, gaudy, and bawdy, except with a 1950’s America twist on it. Somewhat like Weinberger, interested in strength for the sake of strength and not as a means of pushing a policy, except Trump has no understanding of the systems involved unlike Weinberger who had a decent command of the balance of forces he was dealing with at the time.
Right now it seems it’s Dixie-Republicans and white nationalists who have his ear. We need to study more about his son in-law. I’m betting he is someone who Trump trusts, and who knows how to script the world into Trumps emotional worldview. I don’t think space matters to them. Worden comes from the old SDI crowd, and they don’t have Trump’s ear right now. They script policy in terms of systems and capabilities. It’s a language that is too advanced for Trump to understand, and probably makes him feel inadequate and so humiliates him and turns you into an enemy. Newt is your best bet on that front, but so far he’s only an attack dog, he does not seem to be in the inner circle. But again Newt’s ‘failing’ is his use of detail and fact to push his agenda. I think with trump it needs to be scripted in terms of tits, ass, and dollars.
Trump is a salesman–and he would accept salesmen. He schmoozes, and would favor a like mind. I supported SLS–and shuttle-derived heavy lift by calling every Senator I could find–and I didn’t mind the secretary whose job it was to run interference. You see if the person likes talking. I’d like to think I had something to do with Shelby backing SLS. Remember, the EELV lobby in Decatur didn’t like HLVs, they’d rather sell more EELVs and leaky hydrogen depots to keep launch rates up when the DOT.Com bubble burst and the internet-in-the-sky fell through.
They is an old saying that in a competition–try to be the first person seen by a man in charge–and also–be the last person that individual sees.
Everything in the middle vanishes. Mitnick’s social engineering is more important than actual engineering.
The first drop test on Nov. 1 was canceled due to high winds. I thought the decision to even take off was a bit unusual. We got set up to record the drop and the landing out beyond runway 12-30. I got out of the car and my first thought was, they can’t land in this. The flight that crashed had a 10 mph crosswind limit. It seemed windier than that. I’ve seen a lot of flights out here, and I can’t remember anything like that where they flew.
They tried again on Nov. 3, but there was some problem with the vehicle so they returned to Mojave. They haven’t said what the problem was, but it’s been nearly two weeks since then. Two weeks on Thursday.