Space ship one had a cool motor. Small and powerful - and it had a gas peddle.

The last x-plane test confused me. I kept a reminder to watch it on NASA TV. There was a camera on the booster that looked forward over the test "plane". The announcer counted down until seperation. The promise was we were going to watch the seperation and then see the SCRAM ignite. Right when seperation was to have occured the video went blank. The NASA announcer was confused but attempted commentary anyway. I kept going back to the NASA site with hopes the complete video would be available. Never found it.

I heard a few days later that the "model" fell into the pacific.

I don't mind it when the little pieces of infrastructure start to fall apaprt - but I really get bummed when NASA tells me everything went okay - but never explained why the video cut off just when the SCRAM was about to ignite.

The Russians have a whole bunch of technology we never get to see. They have the smallest particle accelerators and they have air transports that look like muffins with little wings. They get a lot done with very little funding.

I wish I could know for sure that the last x-plane was able to ignite the SCRAM - but such is the world!

>Russia claims they have been working on it since the 70s. It may be true but since they waited until Scaled Composites actually was issued a license to conduct flights to publicize the information, we'll never know for sure.
>
>http://www.inauka.ru/englishnews/article40988.html
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_SpaceShipOne
>http://www.scaled.com/