This morning a milestone in the history of space travel was achieved when a rocket plane called SpaceShipOne boldly went where no privately funded manned craft has gone before. Pilot Mike Melvill took the lightweight space plane to an altitude of 100.12 kilometers (62 miles) — just 124 meters above the internationally recognized boundary of outer space — and escaped the Earth's gravity long enough to release a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit and watch them float around, before returning to the ground safely.

The flight was seen as significant because it marks the beginning of the commercialization of space by opening up suborbital flight to civilian tourism. It seems reminiscent of Zefram Cochrane's original motivation for developing warp drive: "money" ("Star Trek: First Contact"). But more altruistically, the entry by private enterprise into the final frontier will likely lead to innovations that will make spaceflight far cheaper and more commonplace than it probably would be under the domain of government.

SpaceShipOne was built by Scaled Composites, with financial backing by Paul G. Allen, Microsoft Corp. cofounder turned investor and philanthropist, to the tune of just over $20 million. Allen is also the financier behind the Science Fiction Museum which recently opened in Seattle (related story). Scaled will be planning two more flights in the near future in order to compete for the Ansari X Prize, a contest promoting the development of a low-cost, efficient craft for space tourism in the same way prize competitions stimulated commercial aviation in the early 20th century.

Stories about this morning's historic flight can be found at most major news sites, including CNN.com, MSNBC.com and Space.com, as well as the inventors' site, Scaled.com.

Crazy Way to Travel...

Physicists in the U.S. and Austria have made yet another breakthrough toward transporting information across distances without using any physical link. Two articles in the science journal Nature report the first teleportation of atoms using principles of quantum entanglement. While teleportation has been accomplished in the past with photons, "We've done it for the first time with massive particles, with atoms," said Rainer Blatt of the University of Innsbruck in Austria. The breakthrough won't immediately lead to the invention of a Trek-like transporter, however, but more likely to super-fast "quantum computers." Blatt said there are quite a few implications to the research, but "We are far away from ... 'Beam me up, Scotty.'" Oh well, we'll just have to keep using the shuttlepod for now. The full Reuters article can be found here.

Breaking the Ice

Speaking of shuttlepods, Travis Mayweather could probably land one on the comet that's been the subject of intense scrutiny lately. NASA's Stardust probe had a close flyby of comet Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt 2") in January and has sent back pictures that have left scientists astounded. The pictures reveal broad mesas, craters, pinnacles and canyons with flat floors. "It's completely unexpected. We were expecting the surface to look more like it was covered with pulverized charcoal," said Donald Brownlee, Stardust's principal investigator. The full report with pictures can be found in this Space.com article. The story points out that, unlike the giant comet encountered by Enterprise in "Breaking the Ice," Wild 2 has almost no gravity, therefore your shuttlepod probably won't be falling through the surface.