The Rocket Man has another marathon post comparing and contrasting the development efforts behind big dumb boosters (ELVs), airplane-like reusables like Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne, and VTVL reusables like the DC-X or the RVT. ELVs, by their nature, are not amenable to incremental flight testing and development. We can all hope that the steady, incremental development of vehicles by the current crop of X-Prize competitors and the Japanese RVT program will lead to cheap access to space in the near future.

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Yesterday, on the centennial of the Wright Brothers' first successful powered manned flight (and landing!), this airplane system made history. But you couldn't tell from the "professional" media coverage.

Professor Hall has a good recap of the event and the [lack of competent] media coverage. In his assessment (and mine) the Washington Post did the best.

Congratulations to Burt Rutan and the teams at Scaled Composites and SpaceDev[*].

[*]Full disclosure -- I own a few hundred shares of SpaceDev stock, the first hundred of which I purchased several years ago when their core mission was to land on and claim ownership an asteroid.

Update: Here's a nice picture; wish there were a little more detail, but still breathtaking.

Update: And here's a video (via Jerry Pournelle).

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Clark Lindsey of Hobbyspace writes about the technical hurdles faced by suborbital RLVs, and interviews a number of the players in the rocket business, including the Rocket Man (you'll have to read the article to learn his real name).

Read the whole thing.

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Lots of good stuff percolating in the blogosphere about "reusable" launch vehicles these days.

Rocket Man starts out with a 1500+ word essay asking after the whereabouts of RLVs. Read the whole thing and follow his links. It may be rocket science, but he is optimistic (like I) that a healthy suborbital RLV industry will lead to a healthy orbital RLV industry, incrementally instead of in one great leap. While he touches on the X-15 and Shuttle, He surprisingly doesn't touch on the US's aborted attempt to build a true rocketship, the Delta Clipper, as an RLV format. But others are filling the gaps, with Clark Lindsay at Hobbyspace covering the Japanese attempt to continue the concept with their RVT program (which I briefly wrote about back on October 24) If that link doesn't work, please scroll down in the archives.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Jerry Pournelle has a running commentary, including much debate about SSTOs here. He is the one from whom I cribbed the title of this post (in regards to rocketships that take off and land on their tails).

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