Oh, I so wish I could go to this.

The Hiller Aviation Museum, a new favorite local destination of mine since I first dropped by last Fall, is hosting an evening fundraiser next October, with Burt Rutan and members of the X-Prize-winning SpaceShipOne team in attendance. Admission is $350 a plate ... but oh, it would be so cool to be there!

If you missed the excitement the first time around, I highly recommend you check out the Discovery Channel's superbly produced “Black Sky: Winning the X Prize” documentary. I was so impressed by it after our TiVo picked it up that I gave a few copies of the DVD set as Christmas gifts last year. I had seen the pictures and read the print stories about the test flights, but neither quite brought home the excitement and significance of the event like this, thanks in no small part to the stunning footage provided by tail- and cockpit-mounted cameras that the producers had available to them. Truly amazing stuff.

In among the interviews, Burt Rutan sums up the technical and economic significance of the achievement with characteristic enthusiasm and no-nonsense determination:

“This is the first time that a small company, without being supported by the government, has developed and flown a supersonic airplane. Now you would think that the first private supersonic airplane would just barely go supersonic in level flight. This morning we went supersonic going almost straight up. [laughs] That was cool!”

—

“Clearly there is an enormous pent-up hunger to fly in space, and not just dream about it. We do want our children to go to the planets. We are willing to seek breakthroughs by taking risks. And if the business-as-usual space developers continue their decades-long pace, they will be gazing from the slow lane as we speed into the new space age.”

SpaceShipOne project engineer Jim Tye had this to add regarding the potential of a determined few:

“Expectations of what individuals can do [have been] slowly degraded over time, and nowadays, people think you need large, multinational corporations or large governments or ... [for example] international cooperation between Russia and China and the United States, and millions of people to do something fantastic. And hopefully we've shown today that twenty people can do something fantastic.”

Something fantastic indeed!