Mike Melvill will become a name to remember: the first civilian astronaut. It's confirmed he reached 100.1241 km altitude this morning. He's just been presented with his astronaut wings.

The nay-sayers have already laid-in with their arguments about "going into space is a lot different to going into orbit." They're failing to see the relevance here : it took Rutan's team $20Million to do this. Think about that for a moment. That's a pitiful amount of money to go from drawing board to space and back.

The bigger question now is : when will they go for the Ansari X Prize? It seems they broke something at full thrust on Spaceship One - no word on what or how long it will take to fix.

And if they do succeed, what next? Orbital travel? Ballistic travel? New York to Tokyo in under an hour?

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