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On Monday, did you realize that as you lounged around the house on the first day
of summer (or went to school for the unlucky few still there) that history was
in the making? Yes, on Monday morning the first successful commercial space ship
left the earth's atmosphere. This first spaceship made and paid for by
non-government people was called Spaceship One (SS1)... I must say it's not a
very original name. But names didn't matter when it was flying up to the stars.
At 8:15 a.m., SS1 was released from the White Knight, an aircraft that flew the
SS1 48,000 miles up. After that, the SS1 was on its own.
The SS1 was piloted by Mike Melville. After being released from the White
Knight, Melville fired up the hybrid rocket motor. Within nine seconds, SS1 had
broken the sound barrier. It climbed up and up, going forward by 3 Gs and up by
2.5 Gs. (G stands for gravity.)
Fifteen seconds after releasing form the White Knight, the SS1's engines shut
down. Melville then maneuvered the plane to go up for a little while longer,
until he had reached a record-breaking 62.5 miles up in the sky, the official
boundary of space.
At one point, it was even weightless and Melville had M&Ms floating in midair
for three minutes. SpaceShipOne then had a twelve-minute glide down to base,
during which it suffered minor damages. However, the flight was successful and
no one was injured.
SS1 was designed and built by Bert Rutan, not by the government, which is the
amazing part about this space flight.
I hope you have learned a lot from this article... oh, who am I kidding, it's
summer! You're too busy forgetting what you learned to learn anything new! lol
So, I hope you try and remember this article, instead of shoving it into the
back of your brain.
This is Hermionez signing off, to balance a coconut on my head.
Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/06/21/suborbital.test/index.html
http://www.califcity.com/space_ship_1.html
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