Milestones

Today marks the thirty-seventh anniversary of the launch of Apollo 17-- the last Apollo mission to the Moon. Tomorrow, December 7, will be the sixty-eighth anniversary of a turning point in modern history, the Japanese attack on the U. S. Navy's Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Far from securing Japanese dominance in the Pacific, the American response to the attack led to the United States achieving superpower status and the American leadership of the Free World in a tense contest with Communist totalitarianism. That contest gave birth to Apollo.

Tomorrow will also see the unveiling of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, which will be the first craft to provide paying custoners suborbital flights to the edge of space. VG plans to commence those commercial flights in 2011, assuming planned test flights go as expected. SpaceShipTwo will carry six passengers and be operated by two pilots. VG already has 250 confirmed customers; at six a pop, that's more than sixty flights already filled. At $200,000 per ticket, VG already has $50 million in ticket sales alone.

SpaceShipTwo will be unveiled in Mojave, California, near America's Pacific Coast.