Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites company today launched a test flight of their X-Prize craft to 211,000 feet, just shy of the fifty mile height required by NASA to be a certified astronaut. They are already the first small company to break the sound barrier, and with another 120,000 feet they will have won the X-Prize, becoming the first non-government group to enter space.
Comments on Slashdot about this event ranged from insightful to stupid, as illustrated by this posting and response:
>They could sell this Technology to the NKoreans
>and then they would have a working ICBM.Not just an ICBM but a manned ICBM. You can imagine the intense competition for that job.