The Laughing Wolf

SpaceshipOne Coverage

0948 hours Eastern: We have liftoff of the tandem unit from the runway. Looked smooth, nice. More later, will try my best to live-blog as it happens.

1005 hours: flipping through the coverage, not impressed by a lot of it. The lack of specialist coverage at the broadcast outlets is outstanding, and not in a good way. The only broadcast outlet with any such in evidence is CNN and Miles O'Brien, who is very knowledgeable on space and somewhat on aviation. Gone are the days when the Old Media three had people like the late, great Jules Begman. Lot of concern over the "new" pilot (more on him here), but Scaled has said all along they planned to use multiple and planned to do so last time, but had to switch because the planned pilot was not 100 percent.

1046 hours: Much as I don't care for the Communist News Network, they do have the best coverage on broadcast. Miles is a good science reporter, and quite the space enthusiast, and it makes a heck of a difference in their coverage. Stewart, in this post has it right.

1048 hours: Separation. Clean release, burn start looks good. Stable. No roll so far. Very stable in comparison with first two flights. Not much yaw either. some shaking reported. Very nice so far. Rocket shutoff. Coast underway. Very, very clean flight so far, remarkably stable. Still coasting up, configured for re-entry. Taking pictures onboard according to radio.

1054 hours: Re-entry underway. All still smooth.

1057 hours: Smoothest flight so far by my eye. Re-entry looks very good, very stable.

1103 hours: Confirmation of Mission Accomplished! Altitude is confirmed and Scaled has indeed won the X-Prize. Chase planes report the craft looks good and things proceeding smoothly for landing.

1105 hours: Well, they will win if he lands intact. My bad for misspeaking.

1107 hours: Low-chase planes have picked him up. Alll continues to look good. It will be interesting to learn how much of this is the result of system tweaks and how much from pilot tweaks based on lessons learned from the previous flights. Net result is a flight that looked very good.

1112 hours: Gear down. Final. Smooth landing. Damn that was smooth, not even a bump as he came on in. They have now indeed won the prize. And we and our children will reap the rewards.

Rand, as usual, has some good coverage and insights.

1117 hours: Chase planes finish(?) victory rolls.