manned space program

After months of research, public hearings, and debate, the NASA Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee, also known as the Augustine Committee, has finally submitted its recommendations to the White House.

Some people may think locking some volunteers in a tin can for a couple of months is enough preparation for a flight to Mars, but the NASA panel reviewing the agency's manned space program envisions a more ambitious set of training wheels: docking with asteroids and a flyby of Venus.

In the bucolic hinterland North of San Diego, on a hillside shaded by eucalyptus and pine, Attila Melkuti pulls open the doors of a barn. Inside, light gleams off a strange and marvelous contraption he’s been piecing together for the past seven years. He pushes his nearly finished creation into the sun: a curvaceous, cherry-red flying machine that looks like nothing so much as the unholy union of a UFO and a Corvette. “The idea came to me in a childhood dream,” he says. “I believe it could transform aviation.”

Melkuti may be the only one who so believes.

October 23, 2003—London. Around the world on a single tank of gas has been done. Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager accomplished the feat in 1986, flying Burt Rutan's brilliant propeller-driven Voyager aircraft. It was a gruelling nine-day ordeal for the duo, and it stretched aviation technology to its limits.

But Richard Branson and Steve Fossett think they can push the technology even further, and today the pair unveiled their plans to go one better—flying solo, and in only a third the time.