Join us for the flight of spaceship one on planetary radio. Radio.

Hello everyone and welcome to a special edition of our show.

Yes, I was lucky enough to be out there in the Mojave Desert when Mike Melville became an astronaut in Bert Rutan's little spaceship on the morning of June 21st.

Stay with us to hear coverage of this historic flight that you won't hear

anywhere else. Bruce Betts was there too as you'll hear in this week's

edition of What's Up. Emily Lachto-walla will be back next week with another great Q&A segment.

Covering the flight of spaceship one may seem a little out of character for planetary radio.

After all, we usually talk about missions measured in millions or billions of kilometers,

not a measly 100 or 62 miles.

But there was no denying that Bert Rutan of scaled composites

and his benefactor Paul Allen of Microsoft

were planning to make history. Hundreds of people have flown into space over the

last 43 years, but every one of them did so on the tip of a rocket owned by a national government,

built by thousands of people, and operated at a cost of, well, a lot of money.

This would be something entirely different.

Scaled composites has just 125 employees,

and only a fraction of them were hands-on with Space ship one,

and its weirdly beautiful mothership, the white night.

The entire budget?

A little more than $20 million, pocket change for NASA.

Could they do it? I knew I had to be there to find out.

Sunday, June 20, 9 PM. What was I doing wandering among hundreds of RVs parked in the desert.

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