The New York Times has an article on SpaceShipOne today. It's a good piece, though it doesn't talk much about the potential for the suborbital flight industry. My biggest issue with it is a subtle one--it appears in the Science section. There's nothing in the article about science, but it just shows how inextricable the perceived relationship is between space and science in the public mind (including New York Times reporters). Now that we're starting to get accurate stories about this, the next step is to get them where they belong--in the Business sections.

On the other hand, today's Wall Street Journal had an article about SpaceShipOne on the front page of the Marketplace section. Also, a few rungs down the ladder from the WSJ, the Long Beach Press-Telegram has a detailed article today on SS1 in its business section.

The upcoming flight has gotten some considerable coverage in today's newspapers: besides these three papers, there are articles about SS1 in several others, including the Dallas Morning News and San Diego Union-Tribune, as I noted earlier today.

Yeah, and everyone calls us "rocket scientists" despite not one of us being a scientist. ENGINEERS. We're engineers. And in making and building things, not researching stuff. :-)

I think the best quote is:

"But that is hardly the point.

'In terms of sheer coolness,' he (Paul Allen)said, 'few things beat rocketry.'"

Having this flight privately financed cuts the legs out from under the "human spaceflight is a waste of resources" argument. People will go into space because they want to. And if they want to spend their own money to do so, more power to them.

So when does Fedex go suborbital?