The big deal of Rutan's "almost-space" flight

Ok, Rutan's craft went close to space. I won't argue about where "space"
begins, but it's high up there, and Rutan (by which I mean his craft) is also
high up there.

What's the big deal? Here are my thoughts.

While it's true that the basic accomplishment of this flight (suborbital,
"close to space", reusable) had been done before (X-15), the key thing is that
the X-15 was an expensive big government project, and this is a much less
expensive, privately financed, relatively small project. The point of the
X-prize, as I see it, is to encourage this kind of approach to space.

So, why is this important? (and thus, why is this an important milestone?) I
don't know. I don't know the future. However, I suspect that opening space to
private enterprise will have significant impact on society.

I tend to see things better by analogy. Granted "past performance does not
guaranatee future results", but I sometimes find it enlightening to look at
things this way.

There is nothing that the early PC did that ENIAC couldn't have done. There is
nothing that present day computers do that mainframes couldn't have done. It's
all ones and zeros and the programs that go with them. However, once the PC
got out, there was a sea change in society. It wasn't the power of the PC that
did it (although some computing power is necessary, of course). Rather, it was
the price. When they became inexpensive enough for people to own them
outright, people started doing things with them that few had envisioned. Few
people were designing rockets with them; mostly it was ordinary stuff (word
processing, internet radio, spreadsheets) but it changed the face of the way
people interact with each other, even spawning this (if you want to call it
that) conversation.

It all =could= have been done with mainframes, but it wasn't going to happen
until ordinary people got their hands on PCs.

Lindbergh's flight also didn't "accomplish" much in and of itself. It was
(nominally) a "first", but it wasn't something that couldn't have happened
earlier. It had to have been possible earlier for it to have happened at all.
So, in that sense, it did not really "advance" aviation. In that sense,
perhaps Rutan's flight doesn't "advance" private space flight either. However,
in both cases, the actual flight served as inspiration to further advancement,
and the prize served as inspiration to make the actual flight in question.

I consider the early PC to be a significant "first", even though computers
existed before. I similarly consider Rutan's flight to be a "first" even
though suborbital reusable "almost-space" flight has happened before.

What is significant in both cases is not =what= was accomplished, but =how= it
was accomplished - because it is the =how= that will lead us into the future,
not the =what=.

Jose


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