The Wrights, Scaled Composites, and SF by twitch

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The Wrights, Scaled Composites, and SF

POSTED BY: TWITCH
UPDATED: Sunday, September 10, 2006 09:18
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Sunday, September 10, 2006 9:18 AM

I was responding to the geek thread and realized this was the perfect venue for asking a question that's been burning me up for the past year or so:

What impact is Spaceship One having on the SF world?

A little over a hundred years ago, there were no airplanes. People came up with stories involving flying, but no one really knew the hows and the whys, so they made them up.

Then the Wright Brothers built and flew the first powered heavier than air flying machine, and the world changed. Once the principles were vaguely understood (VAGUELY), people began building airplanes left and right. Science fiction became reality, and the geeks came out of the woodwork.

Some might argue that defining the impossible should've wrecked the writing of speculative fiction. Instead it energized it. It gave writers focus and a tool to make even more incredible stories.

With the advent of spaceflight, the SF world got a good jolt, but the geeks didn't come out of the woodwork to start building... well... Saturn V rockets... (Can't imagine why.) Spaceflight was seen as something only a huge government could do.

But the real strength of speculative fiction of any sort is that the reader can see themselves doing these things. Hell, this is one of the things that drew me into Firefly and Serenity. I could SEE myself crewing on that ship. (Kaylee, sorry, but the ship DOES need two mechanics, and I'm the other one!)

So we come to the X-Prize and the small spaceship built by Scaled Composites. All of a sudden space IS an every-person place. All of a sudden all these little surface skiffs in all these science fiction stories become not a point of departure from established physics and engineering, but a point of tie-in.

So how's this going to change things in the future? Any ideas?

And how long until the geeks come out of the woodwork and start building more spaceships? Before you laugh, remember this was one of the goals Burt Rutan set when he designed Spaceship One.

-- Twitch

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