The AmericaSpace Team congratulates the Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites team on the successful first ‘captive-carry’ flight of the suborbital VSS ‘Enterprise’. This milestone marks one step closer toward a truly privatized spaceflight venture, accomplished without investing US taxpayer dollars and developed in parallel to NASA’s own Constellation Program.
Burt Rutan, who heads Scaled Composites, has himself commented in a letter to Rep. Wolf that ending the NASA-developed launch vehicles in favor of a risky, commercial-only approach “would be a very big mistake for America to make, as we move into an era of real competition in space exploration as well as risk the loss of our leadership in nearly every other technical discipline.”