Entrepreneurs in Space
Today marked history for space travel. Planet Earth saw its very first commercial, non-governmental manned flight into space, by a craft aptly named SpaceShipOne.OK, so it did not go very far nor last very long. But that doesn’t make the flight any less momentous.
What’s so special is how entrepreneurial it all was. This is not the kind of government-dominated space flight we’ve all been conditioned to expect for the past 40 years. This flight had all the earmarks of a startup venture.
The space craft was designed by someone other than a government employee (Burt Rutan, who built it for a reported US$20 Million, a lot of money to be sure, but a teeny-weeny fraction of what it would have cost NASA). And it was financed by private investment money (billionaire Paul Allen’s). And piloted by a civilian (Michael Melvill, at 63 years old not exactly your 30-something, 1-in-10,000 superman astronaut, but someone that the average person can more easily identify with).
Oh, and it managed to leave Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational field just long enough for some M&M chocolates to float (exactly the kind of do-it-yourself test you would expect pioneering entrepreneurs to use).
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