Billionaire
Paul Allen has acquired SpaceShipOne, again.
The
co-founder of Microsoft, who in 2004 sponsored the development of the world's
first privately-funded crewed spacecraft, added Tuesday a replica of
SpaceShipOne to his publicly-displayed collection of aviation artifacts. The
28-foot, full scale model was hung in the Flying Heritage Collection's Paine
Field hangar in Everett, Washington, to continue the museum's narrative theme
of presenting the evolution of flight.
"One
of the key ideas behind the collection is the changing of technology and how it
affects aviation," said Adrian Hunt, executive director of the Flying
Heritage Collection. "SpaceShipOne actually fits in very well within that
broad message."
"For
example, at one end of the spectrum, we have the Messerschmitt 163, the first
operational rocket plane from the middle 1940s near the end of the second World
War, and then maybe its natural descendant, which would be SpaceShipOne,"
Hunt explained during an interview
with collectSPACE.com.
The Flying
Heritage Collection's SpaceShipOne is in fact, a descendant of the original,
which since 2005 has been on display at the National Air
and Space Museum. Before leaving for Washington, DC, the spacecraft was
used to make a mold from which six replicas were cast by Scaled Composites, the
Mojave, California, company headed by SpaceShipOne's designer, Burt Rutan.
The first
of those replicas went on display in July 2006 at the Experimental Aircraft
Association's (EAA) AirVenture Museum in Wisconsin. Carefully painted to
exactly match the exterior appearance of air-launched SpaceShipOne after flying
the two sub-orbital flights that won it
the $10 million Ansari X Prize in October 2004, the EAA's replica was
modified to allow the vehicle's tail fins to feather.
Since then,
additional replicas have been installed in the William M. Thomas Terminal at
Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield, California; at the New Mexico Museum of
Space History in Alamogordo; outside in Legacy Park at the Mojave Air and Space
Port in California, near where pilots Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie flew the
original three times to space; and even at Google's Headquarters in Mountain
View, California (co-founder Larry Page was an X Prize trustee).
There have
also been temporary exhibits, such as during the 2007 World Space Expo at
NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, where SpaceShipOne joined the
historic launch vehicles on display in their rocket garden.
As with all
of the others, the Flying Heritage Collection's SpaceShipOne is an exterior
replica only. The interior is empty, though the EAA suspended M&M candies inside of theirs, mimicking
the impromtu zero-gravity demo that pilot Melvill made during his first flight
on June 21, 2004.
That Allen,
who solely funded the construction of the first and
only SpaceShipOne was also seemingly the last to receive a replica may seem
odd, but it was more a factor of when delivery could be accepted.
"This
museum only opened on June 6 of last year. Mr. Allen had been collecting these
aircraft for several years but he had been waiting to have a sort of critical
mass of flying aircraft to actually open the museum," said Hunt.
And
although SpaceShipOne is their only replica and the only spacecraft in the
museum, Hunt feels its inclusion is appropriate for more reasons than simply
Allen's history.
"I
think it gives [SpaceShipOne] a wonderful historical context. Our collection
goes from a wood and fabric Curtiss Jenny from 1918 through the Messerschmitt
163 Comet, an all-metal rocket-powered plane. So this is the birthplace for
this wonderful technology... and out of this came rocketry and jets," said
Hunt. "I think it gives it a very different context from what you might
see where it is displayed elsewhere."
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