Oct 4 2004
From The Space Library
SpaceShipOne became the first privately developed, piloted spacecraft to exceed an altitude of 100 kilometers (62.1 miles) twice within 14 days, thus winning the Ansari X Prize competition. The spacecraft launched at 7:00 a.m. (PST) from Mojave Airport in California. During the flight, the spacecraft's pilot Brian Binnie set an unofficial world record for altitude for a private spacecraft, reaching 367,442 feet (69.6 miles or 112 kilometers) above Earth's surface. The founder of the X Prize competition, California entrepreneur Peter H. Diamandis, had modeled the Ansari X Prize on the Orteig Prize, which Charles A. Lindbergh had won in 1927 for completing the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris. To win the competition and its US$10 million award, a private team had to launch a spacecraft with a pilot and an equivalent weight of two passengers to an altitude of 100 kilometers (62.1 miles) twice within two weeks. California-based Scaled Composites had built SpaceShipOne, company founder Burt Rutan had designed the spacecraft, and Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen had financed the project. (X PRIZE Foundation, “Ansari X PRIZE,” http://space.xprize.org/ansari-x-prize (accessed 12 May 2009); Scaled Composites, “SpaceShipOne Captures X-Prize,” 4 October 2004,http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/041004_spaceshipone_x-prize_flight_2.html (accessed 12 May 2009); John Schwartz, “Private Rocket Ship Earns $10 Million in New Space Race,” New York Times, 5 October 2004.
NASA scientists reported that many of the samples from the Genesis space capsule had survived the spacecraft's crash on 8 September 2004. NASA had launched Genesis in 2001 to obtain particle samples from solar winds, planning to use the particles in a study of the chemical composition of the solar system during its creation billions of years ago. However, Genesis's sample-return capsule had failed to land on Earth as planned. Instead, it had crashed into the Utah desert, risking the destruction of the particle samples. However, although the crash had complicated the extraction and processing of the capsule's fragile, wafer-like, sample-collection plates, NASA scientists had found many of the samples intact and usable for subsequent analyses. (Warren E. Leary, “Space Specimens Saved from Wrecked Capsule,” New York Times, 5 October 2004.
Former astronaut Leroy Gordon Cooper died at age 77 in Ventura, California. One of the original seven astronauts for the Mercury program, the United States' first human spaceflight program, Cooper was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, on 6 March 1927. He had joined the U.S. Air Force in 1949, and NASA had selected him as a Mercury astronaut in April 1959. In May 1963, Cooper had piloted the program's last mission, which lasted 34 hours and 20 minutes ~ longer than all the combined duration of all previous Mercury missions. Cooper had made his second and final trip to space on Gemini 5 in August 1965, in a two-person mission that had set a record for space endurance of 191 hours. The mission had demonstrated that humans could survive in a weightless environment and, therefore, that a trip to the Moon was feasible. In addition, Cooper had been the first American astronaut to make two spaceflights, to sleep in space, and to appear in a televised broadcast from space. After retiring from the Air Force in 1970, he had run several companies, including a consulting firm specializing in projects ranging from aerospace to hotel development. (John Johnson, “Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr., 77,” Los Angeles Times, 5 October 2004; Matthew L. Wald, “Gordon Cooper, Astronaut, Is Dead at 77,” New York Times, 5 October 2004.
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