The Right Stuff

Take $20 million, the man who designed the Voyager aircraft which flew around the world on a single tank of gas in the 1980's, a whole lot of imagination, a whole lot of engineering simplicity, and one pilot with a lot of testicular fortitude and you have today's launch of SpaceShipOne.

A privately built rocketplane managed to get 100km into the air making pilot Mike Melvill an official astronaut. It was beautiful to watch on CNN. Hopefully getting to space will be cheaper over the next several years, because I'm going up before I die and I'm humming 'Battle Hymn of The Republic' on the way down!