There’s great historic content in the chapter, “Rotary Unraveled,” describing his 1999 copilot experience in flying Rotary Rocket’s Roton vehicle, built to be a single stage to orbit spaceship. The author is far from being reticent, scripting an absorbing, humbling and tell-all account of his following Rutan’s “Looking Up… Way Up” credo to his own insights of “Looking Down…Way Down.”īy way of 47 chapters and scads of edifying sidebars, the author steers the reader through a saga of volatile technical challenges encountered in his career, doing so in humorous, often self-effacing writing style. And that’s found well before the main text, carried on the “ All rights reserved” page. There are no intentions implied to suggest otherwise,” Binnie writes. How the author claimed his rocket ride into the history books is an entrancing story. That pioneering passage of space and time marked a new era of commercial space flight.
On October 4, 2004, with Binnie at the controls of SpaceShipOne, he flew the second suborbital flight in one week’s time to capture the $10 million Ansari X Prize flight purse. Binnie is a former United States Navy officer and test pilot for SpaceShipOne, the experimental spaceplane created by aeronautical pioneer, Burt Rutan, and his innovative company, Scaled Composites. This is an extraordinary book and it is a true, “can’t put it down” volume.
The Magic and Menace of SpaceShipOne by Brian Binnie Black Sky Enterprise 500 pages OctoOrdering information at:
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