Virgin Galactic’s plan to fly SpaceShipTwo’s first commercial suborbital flight next week falls near the anniversary of the first spaceflight by its predecessor, SpaceShipOne, on June 21, 2004. Here’s a look back at that day nearly two decades ago.

The temperature was still hovering around 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Mojave when the summer solstice arrived at 5:57 PM on June 20, 2004. The weather in the High Desert was a marked change from the chilly and overcast Los Angeles that we had left the day before. The LA Basin was in the middle of June Gloom, a weather phenomenon where a marine layer that normally stays offshore moves inland to block out the sun, sending temperatures plunging.

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

The first three passenger flights of Blue Origin’s New Shepard have been long on symbolism. On the first one, Jeff Bezos invited Wally Funk, who in 1960 was one of 13 women who underwent the same medical checks as the Original Seven Mercury astronauts. NASA wasn’t accepting female pilots at the time, so Funk had to wait 51 years to reach space.

New Shepard’s second flight included starship Capt. James T. Kirk, or more precisely, the actor who played the “Star Trek” captain, William Shatner. The third flight had Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of America’s first astronaut to fly to space, who launched aboard a vehicle named after her father, Alan.

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

MOJAVE, Calif. — Stratolaunch’s Roc — the world’s largest airplane by wing span at 385 ft (117.3 m) — flew for the fourth time on Thursday. In a sign of just how complicated the massive air-launch platform is to fly, one of the main objectives of this flight test was to retract and lower the plane’s landing gear at altitude for the first time ever.

Video Caption: Stratolaunch Lead Systems Engineer Stu Yun discusses preparation for the carrier aircraft’s fourth flight test, in which the team will retract and extend all of the aircraft landing gear for the first time. Editor’s Note: The video spotlights some of the tradeoffs with advanced flying machines built by Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites. They are capable of very innovative designs that push the outside of the envelope on […]

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

MOJAVE, Calif. — The Mojave Air and Space Port has renamed itself to honor aviation and space pioneers Burt and Dick Rutan. The facility in California’s High Desert is now known as the Mojave Air and Space Port at Rutan Field.

“Whereas, Burt Rutan and Dick Rutan have made significant contributions in experimental aviation design, fabrication, and flight test at Mojave Air and Space Port, with their combined contributions resulting in first flights of over sixty unique experimental aircraft, including one twenty-year period with an average of a first flight of a new manned research type every eight and a half months,” the Board of Directors said in a resolution passed last month.

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

For eight years, they thundered aloft in cramped Russian spacecraft from a former Soviet spaceport in Kazakhstan, battling bureaucracy and gravity to blaze a trail across the heavens and redefine what it meant to be a space traveler. No longer would access to orbit be limited to highly trained astronauts chosen on merit and working on behalf of their nations; instead, space would be open to any sufficiently healthy people with enough money and moxie to qualify.

Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back.
Burn the land and boil the sea,
You can’t take the sky from me….

— “The Ballad of Serenity,” Sonny Rhodes

“After so many years and so much hard work, New Mexico has finally reached the stars.”

— New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

By now, you’ve probably read the rhetoric flourishes in Virgin Galactic’s press release about the company’s first suborbital flight test in more than two years that was conducted on Saturday. Suffice to say, if the stars were located at the altitude that SpaceShipTwo actually reached (55.45 miles/89.2 km), they would take the sky away at the same time they burned the land and boiled the seas. Being suborbital, VSS Unity wouldn’t have helped anyone escape the inferno.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen. So, let’s just put doomsday out of our minds. It’s time to break down what the flight test accomplished, what comes next, and why 27 months passed between powered flights. And what about Jeff Bezos?

Ready? Let’s go!

Flight signals revival of giant airplane, which will focus on launching hypersonic test vehicles.

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

For the first time in 2 years 16 days, Stratolaunch’s massive Roc aircraft roared down the runway at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California and soared into in clear blue sky on only its second ever flight test.

Roc took off at 7:31 a.m. PDT time, trailing a giant cloud of dust stirred up by its six jet engines and giant 385-ft long wings that hung out over the desert scrub brush. The aircraft flew over the Mojave Desert for more than three hours as a crowd that had gathered for takeoff watched.

Two years ago today, on April 13, 2019, Stratolaunch’s enormous dual fuselage aircraft with a 385-ft wingspan took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port trailing a cloud of dust. It flew over the Mojave Desert for 2 hours 29 minutes before landing back on runway 12-30. The plane was the dream child of Scaled Composites’ founder Burt Rutan and funded by the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen. […]

Test pilot Brian Binnie’s long-planned insider account of the SpaceShipOne program seems to be finally coming together. The book, titled “The Magic and Menace of SpaceShipOne,” recounts how Burt Rutan and a small team at Scaled Composites won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004. SpaceShipOne won the prize for being the first privately-built crewed spaceship to fly to space twice within two weeks. Binnie was the pilot for […]