This is a privately funded suborbital space endeavor.
Our mission is to launch a human being into space.
We are currently developing a series of suborbital space vehicles – designed to pave the way for manned space flight on a micro size spacecraft.
Two rocket vehicles are under development. A small unmanned sounding rocket, named Hybrid Atmospheric Test Vehicle or HATV and a larger booster rocket named Hybrid Exo Atmospheric Transporter or HEAT, designed to carry a micro spacecraft into a suborbital trajectory in space.
What fun! The thought of riding into the sky inside a rocket!
For my fellow dreamers in the audience, here’s a little something to momentarily take your mind off financial instruments, presidential debates and environmental doom:
“This is a great day for SpaceX and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team,” said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. “The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion—middle of the bull’s-eye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake.”
Watching that makes me feel that – as a species – we’re pretty awesome. It’s just a shame we can’t stop arguing over which subgroups of the species are more awesome than the others… what might we achieve then?
Danish researchers at the Copenhagen Suborbitals project seek to launch a one-man rocket projectile into space, from their mission statement: