Since the Government can screw up a free lunch, I’d say that if we had let Burt Rutan run the Mercury project for fame and profit we would now have bases and bars on both the Moon and Mars. SpaceShipOne, not a gumdrop-shaped projectile but an airplane, zoomed into space (114 kilometers above California) on 29 September 2004 and again on 4 October 2004 to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

Burt says, “The complexity you remove can never fail.” His wind tunnel was a Ford pickup truck with whatever was being tested mounted on top. His pressurization system was two bottles of compressed air and one of oxygen. His rocket fuel was really exotic: rubber tires and laughing gas. His flight control system was a stick, a rudder and, above Mach 1, electric trim control available on 747s. The spaceship was launched at 47,000 feet from a specially designed mother ship, the White Knight. The only computers on board were in the navigation system and in the cockpit display.

The real trick is slowing a spaceship down when it comes screaming into the atmosphere – in this case at Mach 3. Rutan could have spent all of Donald Trump’s money on designing tiles to survive when the re-entering ship reached the melting point of fire brick and nearly cooked his pilot, like NASA nearly cooked Shepard and Glenn. Instead he played it cool and used air brakes. The ship folds up like a letter in an envelope, rotating its fuselage and wing bottoms to present a wide flat surface to the wind. It nearly stops dead in this “feathered” mode.

The next trick is to put a space airplane into orbit – in deep space – to launch satellites for $10,000 instead of $10 million a piece. A step in that direction was taken on 16 November when a scramjet engine was tested in the X-43A. This engine will carry a space plane to the top of the mesosphere and send it off at 7000mph before the rockets need to be fired in the exosphere for maneuvering.

In 2007, Sir Richard Branson of the Royal Aeronautical Society will offer tourists suborbital space flights on the Rutan-built VSS Enterprise for £110,000 a thrill ride. Does this remind you of air races and barn storming in the 20’s? Well, it should. In another 80 years because of business a la Pan American who invented Irish Coffee, not government a la Billy Mitchell who was exiled to Panama, you will be able to fly from New York to Tokyo in two hours or to the Moon and relax at the Club Med there.