New Space Race: Make Extraterrestrial Travel Cheap And Safe For Ordinary People…
CBS :
A plan to build the world’s first airport for launching commercial spacecraft in New Mexico is the latest development in the new space race, a race among private companies and billionaire entrepreneurs to carry paying passengers into space and to kick-start a new industry, astro tourism.
The man who is leading the race may not be familiar to you, but to astronauts, pilots, and aeronautical engineers – basically to anyone who knows anything about aircraft design – Burt Rutan is a legend, an aeronautical engineer whose latest aircraft is the world’s first private spaceship. As he told 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley when he first met him a little over a year ago, if his idea flies, someday space travel may be cheap enough and safe enough for ordinary people to go where only astronauts have gone before.
First Posted: 03/28/08 03:43 AM ET Updated: 05/25/11 12:50 PM ET