On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 08:38:35 -0800, "gatt"
wrote:

What was the point of flying a few yards at Kitty Hawk?

Seriously, I think the point was not that they were lobbed into near space,
but that it was done my private enterprise.

Gatt, I appreciate what the Wright bros. did but they were pioneers,
the first to achieve controlled flight. They did their research,
decided that in order to achieve viable flight the vehical needed to
be controllable and built a vehical that could do that, sort of.

What Burt Rutan did was prove that privately funded people can achieve
what has already been done with government funding. He did not
pioneer anything, he just came up with a different way to achieve
something that's already been done.

You will notice that none of the countries that have achieved space
flight bother to simply lob vehicals, whether manned or otherwise
(unless something goes wrong with the booster), into near space
anymore. That's because there's nothing to gain scientifically or
technologically from doing so. Vehicals that leave the atmosphere to
enter space and then return to earth must be built very differently
from those that merely graze space.

Corky Scott