airborne
Orville and Wilbur Wright.
100 years ago today, Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully flew their Flyer for the first time. A twelve second flight over the Kitty Hawk sand dunes with Orville strapped to a fragile contraption of wood, fabric, and a four cylinder gas engine ignited revolutions in warfare, commercial travel, exploration, and communication. Under two decades later, commercial passenger flights were commonplace. In 1947, Chuck Yeager flew his X-1 faster than the speed of sound; and it 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon.
Historian Paul Johnson argued in his seminal Modern Times that the modern age was established in 1919 when a photographs of a solar eclipse confirmed Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. With this, the Newtonian and Euclidean assumptions of the Industrial Age were extinguished forever. Sixteen years earlier, the Wright brothers flight, if not changing the nature of how the world is understood, made it clear the extent to which man could control his own destiny through the use of technology. With that, came both great leaps in human understanding and great leaps in the efficiency in which we could kill one another.
The astounding rate at which aircraft technology progressed has little comparison, except perhaps Moore's Law. Only eleven years after Orville Wright's timid journey in North Carolina, warring nations were using planes in combat - some of which were designed and built by the Wrights. Within forty years, German engineers built the first jet powered planes. Contrast this to contemporary space travel, where the current state of the art is the thirty year old Space Shuttle. Imagine Japanese and American air forces clashing over the Pacific in First World War style biplanes and you have some idea how truly different the rate of progress is between air and space travel.
Part of this has to do with the fact that until recently, space travel had no functional purpose for the average man on the street, nor was there any opportunity for a typical citizen to directly benefit from the space program. This is changing, tentatively, as private rocket developers are working to provide an non-governmental alternative. Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites made their first supersonic test of their SpaceShipOne on the centennial of the Wright Brothers flight and the private space tourism industry is available to those with $20 million to spend. When Rutan or one of the other groups working on an economical form of private space flight launches their first mission, it - unlike Yuri Gagarin's 1961 flight - may the true successor of the Wright Brothers achievements.
03.12.2003 © ljr