Von Braun team member watches SpaceShipOne soar
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
One of the members of Wernher von Braun's Huntsville rocket team that helped launch the "Space Age" six decades ago stood witness in the California desert Monday as the first private voyage slipped into weightless space.
Dr. Konrad Dannenberg watched as Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne lifted off on an airplane carrier ship, burned its rocket motors and safely returned to Earth.
"I could see the vapor trail of the mothership aircraft, and then could see the engines light and burn," Dannenberg said. "It was the expected duration. It must have been, for they made it the 62 miles up. It was a great moment."
Dannenberg, now in his 90s, witnessed a similar launch in Peenemuende, Germany, more than 60 years ago. He was present in October 1942 when German rocket teams launched the first A-4, or V-2, rocket; it crossed the 50-mile altitude line that experts say is the beginning of space.
On Monday, SpaceShipOne pilot Mike Melvill broke the barrier of gravity and managed to fly 62.2 miles above the Earth.
The private spacecraft touched down at Mojave Airport to applause and cheers about 90 minutes after it was carried aloft by the jet-powered White Knight aircraft.
It was another historic event for Dannenberg, who has also witnessed launches of Army Redstone rockets, along with NASA's Saturn rockets that took men to the moon.
"It is a big, historic event for all of us," Dannenberg said Monday. "The flight to space will be forever different now.
"I think this is going to be a new day in the space age."
Dannenberg said rocket work and space travel met at a critical juncture Monday - a switch from government-funded programs to private endeavors.
"Many people think this is the natural progression," he said. "I feel it is the way it should be done. ... NASA might have to change their approach somewhat and be a little bit more open-minded and turn some things over to private industry."
Dannenberg's comments echo one of the key recommendations of a presidential commission that studied NASA: Increase the involvement of private companies. The group issued its report last week.
SpaceShipOne and the White Knight carrier aircraft were built by Rutan's company, Scaled Composites. The project was paid for in part by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who described the cost of the venture to The Associated Press as in "excess of $20 million."
Although Monday's flight appeared to go flawlessly, Rutan revealed afterward there was a serious malfunction when SpaceShipOne's trim system failed, causing it to miss its atmospheric re-entry point by 22 miles. There was also a large bang during the flight, but SpaceShipOne's team did not know the cause.
Although Rutan said the malfunction posed "no big deal" to the flight's safety, he said the system would have to be fixed before the plane could fly again.
The streamlined, private approach may be the way everyday citizens travel into space, said Ray Cronise, a Huntsville businessman and former NASA engineer.
"Every entrepreneur is going to be excited that Burt Rutan has now crossed this bridge," said Cronise, who traveled with Dannenberg to view the launch. "He had the opportunity to build spaceships in a very fundamental way.
"We were walking around it freely 45 minutes after its return, sticking flashlights up into the nose section and looking at it ... and there were no clean rooms and no quarantines afterward. It was just a practical experience."
A former Marshall Space Flight Center employee, Cronise left in the mid-1990s to start his own business. He now uses NASA technology to build swimming pools and is part of a company called Zero-G that flies specially outfitted jetliners to simulate weightless flight.
Cronise said Rutan's team was successful because they did "only what was needed, and documented only what was needed.
"It was a bunch of guys in blue jeans and T-shirts with step ladders bought at Home Depot doing what they needed to do to launch this spacecraft," Cronise said. "They treat spaceships like airplanes and, if that's the way this continues, then we can" build a private, affordable launch system.
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