Don't forget the DVD set from the Discovery Channel titled Black Sky: The Race For Space. I watched all 3 hours on TV the other night and can't wait to own the DVDs. It has great footage of the White Knight and SpaceShipOne being built, a lot of interviews with the people responsible, and fantastic flight footage both inside and outside the cockpit.

Some of the pilot interviews are sobering. One, I think it was Mike Melville, discussed what would've happened had the tail booms failed to deflect into shuttlecock mode. He said that the plane would've pointed nose down and quickly accelerated to some 4,000 MPH. At that speed, the friction would've softened the epoxy and the plane would've come apart with fatal results.

The flight footage showed both the successes they had and the problems they encountered. On Mike's June flight that barely broke the 100 KM altitude, he heard several loud bangs and thought the plane had suffered tail failure (the loudest was a fairing that buckled). He was very concerned and thought he might die, but he still had the presence of mind to pull the M&Ms from his pocket to demonstrate weightlessness. Mike wasn't supposed to make the first X Prize flight. The scheduled pilot, Seibold, got sick shortly before the flight so the job went to Mike. His wife wasn't too pleased.

I've followed Burt Rutan's activities for 30 years now, ever since I saw his VariViggen homebuilt design at Oshkosh 74. He's a hell of a guy whose thought processes are so unorthodox that he isn't even in the same building as a box, much less inside one. To listen to him in the interviews, including the times when he was so choked up that he could hardly speak, was inspiring.

You mentioned one of the rocket tests. In the video, they wanted to know the temperature of the rocket's exhaust plume. They could've set up a bunch of sensors, but they strung up marshmellows and hot dogs instead. Likewise, when they determined that the control surfaces were too small, they mounted test surfaces on a boom mounted on the front of a pickup truck and drove at high speed up and down the runway. After some 50 speed runs, they had the tail design they wanted.