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Private-Sector Astronaut Faults Nasa Leadership ; Space Agency Suffered From Bad Decisions at the Top, Melvill Says

Posted on: Saturday, 15 October 2005, 06:00 CDT

By Peter Bacque; Contact Peter Bacque at (804) 649-6813\ or pbacque@timesdispatch.com

The nation's space agency has been badly led and it is so fearful of taking risks it's endangering its own astronauts, the first man to fly a private aircraft into space says.

"NASA's been misguided from the top," test pilot and civilian astronaut Mike Melvill said in a telephone interview last week.

"There's nothing wrong at the bottom," he said. "They just need someone to steer them in the right direction."

Melvill said he hopes NASA's new director, Michael Griffin, will provide that leadership.

"You can't go forward if you're not willing to take risks," the South African-born pilot said. "That's a big problem with NASA. They try to cover every single contingency and I think, at the end of the day, they hurt themselves.

"Private enterprise can do things in many ways much more efficiently," Melvill, 64, said. "As small as we are and as little money as we had, we did amazing things."

Flying SpaceShipOne last year, Melvill reached a record-breaking altitude of 328,491 feet -- or 62.2 miles -- making him the first private citizen to fly out of the atmosphere and earn the wings of an astronaut.

He is also the oldest pilot in command of a spaceflight. "If you look after yourself and eat right," he said, "you can go a long way."

Melvill will describe his spaceflights and sign autographs at the Science Museum of Virginia from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

Aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan designed SpaceShipOne, and Rutan's company, Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., built it.

SpaceShipOne was registered with the Federal Aviation Administration as a glider, and Melvill had to earn a commercial glider pilot's license to make the flight, he said.

End-to-end cost -- designing and constructing the reusable spacecraft, its rocket motor, its launch plane and a flight simulator -- was about $25 million, said Melvill, who is Scaled's vice president and general manager.

Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen paid for the SpaceShipOne project, which had no government sponsorship.

Though the spaceship was built to compete for the $10 million X- Prize, a privately funded competition promoting spaceflight, the program's prime aim was to demonstrate putting people in space at low cost, Rutan has said.

NASA's budget this year is $16.2 billion, and its original man- in-space program -- Project Mercury -- cost $384 million in the 1960s, or about $2.5 billion in today's dollars.

"We don't try to do things the hard way," Melvill said of Scaled's design philosophy. "We do it with simple things because we believe simple things will, in the end, work.

"This whole program was about keeping everybody alive," Melvill said of SpaceShipOne's accomplishments. "We were asking three pilots to take some tremendous risks."

In fact, the space plane started rolling wildly as it climbed straight up at thousands of miles an hour before Melvill could bring it under control: "It was terrifying."

As the rocket engine shut down, he was on trajectory far from Earth, "and there's not a thing you can do to change that."

"It was great," he said of his four minutes in space on that first flight.

"You can see this little thin skin of atmosphere," he marveled. "That's all there is."

Source: Richmond Times - Dispatch

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