I just noticed that the audio of my interview with Warren Olney on Monday is on line.

Tariq Malik has a piece on the new space prize today, in which he writes:

Former astronaut and U.S. senator John Glenn’s 1998 space shuttle seat cost NASA $50 million, and private orbital passengers like Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth have paid about $20 million for jaunts to the International Space Station, McCurdy added. At present, British millionaire Sir Richard Branson’s announcement of suborbital flights on his newly christened Virgin Galactic venture will cost around $190,000.

I’d be curious to know where he got the fifty-million number. There is no accepted cost for a Shuttle seat–it all depends on how one wants to do the accounting. I’m guessing that he (or whoever gave him the number) came up with an average cost for a Shuttle flight in the year that he flew (perhaps $350M, itself a contentious number, and probably low), and then divided by the number of crew.

But this is a completely arbitrary way to do it, and in fact extremely overprices it, since it values the cost of delivering a payload bay full of tons of cargo at zero.

The reality is that John Glenn’s flight cost virtually nothing, at the margin. They could have flown seat full of John Glenn, or seat empty, and the cost of the flight would have been identical, other than training costs. Unless the services of the Shuttle are “unbundled,” there’s no definitive way to put a cost on a seat.

I’ve been too busy to blog today, but Derek Lyons has some thoughts about what lies ahead for the suborbital industry.

I hope that whatever “aerospace industry expert” assured the insurance company that there was little chance that the X-Prize could be won has trouble finding further consulting work.

John Weidner was there with a camera. I wish I could have been.

[Update at 10 PM EDT]

Clark Lindsey finally found an internet connection, and has lots of updates from Mojave.

And then there were three.

On the forty-seventh anniversary of Sputnik, on the day that the Ansari Prize was won, astronaut Gordon Cooper, one of the original Mercury Seven, has died. Of those seven, only Scott Carpenter, John Glenn, and Wally Schirra remain with us.

Of course, he was not an uncontroversial astronaut:

In his post-NASA career, Cooper became known as an outspoken believer in UFOs and charged that the government was covering up its knowledge of extraterrestrial activity.

“I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth,” he told a United Nations panel in 1985.

“I feel that we need to have a top-level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the Earth concerning any type of encounter, and to determine how best to interface with these visitors in a friendly fashion.”

He added, “For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us.”

Nonetheless, he was a hell of a pilot. Rest in peace in the cosmos.

Glenn’s been throwing me lots of links, lately, deservedly or not, so I’m happy to be able to link back to a nice post of his at MSNBC about today’s winning of the Ansari Prize.

I’ll be in a short segment of Warren Olney’s “To The Point” at 2PM EDT, discussing the implications of the X-Prize.

[Update at 2:30]

It went very well. Warren (who is an excellent interviewer) just wanted a five-minute update on how the flight went, and the implications for the future of space. It should be available for streaming sometime today, and it will be rebroadcast in LA on KCRW at 1 PM Pacific.

My former co-worker at Rotary Rocket, Brian Binnie, will be piloting today’s (hopefully) prize-winning flight.

[Update a couple minutes later]

After a little surfing, my recommendation is to watch on MSNBC if you get it. Intead of John Pike, they’ve got Jim Oberg to provide commentary.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

Oops. He just misspoke, saying that the FAA would have to certify the spaceship that Burt builds for Branson. Not under the current regulatory regime. All they will have to do is get a launch license.

[Another update]

I switched back to Fox, where Bridget Quinn was interviewing Walt Cunningham. When she asked him if this meant that we’d be able to go into space, he splashed cold water on the idea, saying that maybe her “children’s children” would do it. He then went on to explain that what Branson wanted to do would be much more expensive, because SpaceShipOne didn’t have all the redundant systems that “safety regulators” would require.

Grrrrr…

He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, since there are no “safety regulators” when it comes to passenger spaceflight. The FAA is concerned only with third-party (uninvolved people on the ground) not first or second parties. As I said, there is currently no such thing as certification for such vehicles–only launch licensing, and that is a process that doesn’t oversee passenger safety.

[Update after launch]

Well, that was a lot smoother than the first two. I don’t know if Brian is a better pilot, or if he was on the lookout for things based on his discussions with Mike Melvill.

Shortly after apogee, someone said that he’s won the prize.

Not yet. He has to land safely first…

[Update at 11:10 or so]

OK, the nosewheel just touched down. The prize is won, once they verify the altitude, which if it holds up at 368,00 feet will be a new altitude record, beating the previous one long held by the X-15 by almost three miles.

Dale Amon (who just called me to inform me of that) has been covering this as well.

On this date, forty-seven years ago, from the windy steppes of Kazakhstan, a missile, originally designed to deliver a deadly warhead, sundered the skies. But its payload was not a bomb, but a basketball-sized sphere of metal with transponders. Its destination was not another territory on earth, but the semi-permanent freefall of outer space. It was the first object since the dawn of time, crafted by humans, to enter orbit around our planet. It was the beginning of the space age.

As I write these words, it’s still dark in Mojave, California. If it’s a typical night there, the winds are high, even howling, rattling the rafters of the airport hangars, many of which were built years before that first satellite launch. But in an hour or so, the rising sun will slowly illuminate the desert, and the winds will die down. A crowd will be gathered to watch an ungainly-looking aircraft, resembling mating birds or insects, as it taxis out to challenge the heavens for the second time within less than a week.

If today’s flight is successful, and the prize is won, many may look back on this anniversary as a dual one. October 4th will not only be commemorated as the day that the old space age began, but perhaps, the new one as well.