We haven't sat down with Scott and Caroline and said, Now you realize that there's X amount of pounds of thrust. And this can happen and that can happen.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If you move something 10 pounds through space and then stop suddenly, there's a little overshoot. When you transfer weight from one leg to another, there's a certain way that it happens.
The rocket had worked perfectly, and all I had to do was survive the reentry forces. You do it all, in a flight like that, in a rather short period of time, just 16 minutes as a matter of fact.
Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.
The great weight of the ship may indeed prevent her from acquiring her greatest velocity; but when she has attained it, she will advance by her own intrinsic motion, without gaining any new degree of velocity, or lessening what she has acquired.
We do need different types of propulsion to get to Mars. I wrote one of the first Ph.D. theses on that in the 1960s.
In our gliding experiments we had had a number of experiences in which we had landed upon one wing, but the crushing of the wing had absorbed the shock, so that we were not uneasy about the motor in case of a landing of that kind.
The delay in SpaceShipTwo has not been the development of either of the vehicles. But the rocket motor has just been problematic from the get-go.
If you stop and think about it, the form of propulsion used today hasn't changed in over a thousand years... since the invention of fireworks by the Chinese.
Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.
We don't have the capability today to put a human being in space of any kind, shape or form, which is absolutely, totally unacceptable when we got the greatest flying machine in the world sitting down at Kennedy in a garage there with nothing to do.