A month ago, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne achieved a height of 62.2 miles above the Mojave Desert in a flight that lasted all of 15 minutes. The spaceship, privately designed, privately funded and privately flown, pretty much proved that in terms of efficiency, achievement and cost, private industry is perfectly capable of not only competing with, but outstripping government in the exploration of space.

The ship's investors — primarily Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen — spent something on the order of $20 million (a tiny fraction of NASA's annual budget) to design, build and fly it, without experiencing any insurmountable problems. The only one that came close was — the desert tortoise.

Seems that Mr. Rutan had a terrible time getting permission for the flight from the Environmental Protection Agency, and only received the agency's go-ahead after convincing EPA officials that the odds against the ship crashing in the desert were so high that he could pretty much guarantee that no desert tortoise would be harmed.

The desert tortoise is on the endangered species list, which means among other things they're dying out (we're told). That means there aren't enough of them to continue to propagate successfully. Yet their habitat stretches across a couple of million acres in the Southwestern United States. So what are the chances that, if SpaceShipOne crashed, a desert tortoise would be hit and killed? One in a million? Two million? Fortunately, even the EPA finally admitted its objections to the flight were based on ludicrous logic.


http://www.vvdailypress.com/cgi-bin/newspr...090414529,40126,