May 13 2004
From The Space Library
A piloted rocket called SpaceShipOne reached the highest altitude ever attained by a privately funded vehicle. After its release from a plane flying over the Mojave Desert in California, the winged rocket flew to an altitude of 211,400 feet (40 miles or 64 kilometers). The vehicle's pilot Michael W. Melvill landed SpaceShipOne at Mojave Airport. The event was a test flight in preparation for the planned official launch of SpaceShipOne on 2 June 2004. Scaled Composites, the company that had built the rocket, intended SpaceShipOne to become the first privately funded, piloted vehicle to achieve suborbital flight. Scaled Composites had built SpaceShipOne for use in commercial spaceflights ~ spaceflights in which customers pay a fee for a brief trip to outer space. (Peter Pae, “In Capital Venture, Rocket Reaches the Edge of Space,” Los Angeles Times, 14 May 2004; Scaled Composites, “Historic Space Launch Attempt Scheduled for June 21,” news release, 2 June 2004, http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/062104.htm (accessed 27 March 2009).
Researchers announced that they had found the remains of a large object that crashed into Earth 250 million years ago, possibly causing the largest mass extinction in history. Previously, many scientists had agreed that a large-scale event ~ the Permian-Triassic extinction ~ had occurred approximately 250 million years ago. However, they had debated about whether volcanic activity or the impact of an extraterrestrial object such as a meteor had caused the event. A team of scientists led by Luann Becker of University of California at Santa Barbara reported the discovery of strong evidence for the impact theory ~ part of a meteorite or comet, nearly 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter, buried in sediment off the coast of Australia. Based on analysis of the object's age and mineral composition, the team believed that the object might have caused the Permian-Triassic extinction ~ the extinction of 90 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species. NASA and the National Science Foundation had funded the scientists, who cautioned that their findings did not prove definitively that extraterrestrial impact had caused the extinction event. (Guy Gugliotta, “Impact Crater Labeled Clue to Mass Extinction,” Washington Post, 14 May 2004; Richard A. Kerr, “Evidence of Huge, Deadly Impact Found off Australian Coast?” Science 304, no. 5673 (14 May 2004): 941.
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