Izzy B As an amateur builder of composite aircraft and a pilot, I really appreciated this documentary that tells a wonderful, true story of positive achievement by people who worked hard to accomplish something significant...without the government having to bless it or pay for it. Rutan has a long history of creating some amazing designs focused on efficiency and demonstrating new limits of small and GA aircraft. But it's also important to celebrate the accomplishment of Mike Melvill in becoming the first civilian astronaut. His uncommon ability and performance has paved the way for the common man to finally be able to touch the black sky too.

BushLiedMarinesDied First of all this is a pretty good documentary, but too much of a love-fest for Rutan.Spaceship 1 has achieved very, very little. It got up to over 100km, the edge of space, but it wasn't going fast enough to even complete one partial orbit. Compare this to 60 years ago, when Werner Von Braun sent a rocket sent his V2 rockets almost as high & traveling a darned sight faster. True there was no passenger & no attempt at a controlled re-entry, but this was 60 years before & there was no "first stage" to get it up t 30,000ft unlike Spaceship 1. This is "progress"???? Basically Spaceship 1 expended all its energy on getting high, there was no attempt to orbit, which is a feat that requires a lot more speed & a considerably larger expenditure of energy.Rutan did the absolute minimum possible to win the prize, I doubt the original people behind setting the criteria imagined that anyone would simply throw an object up & then wait for it to come down. This was all about orbital space flight, which Spaceship 1 clearly failed to do.I dislike his "aw shucks" hick mentality when it comes to government, a trait betraying his narrow mindedness & ego centric mentality. I remember a sign being waved (albeit not by Rutan) when Spaceship 1 landed, it read "Spaceship 1, Government 0".... so what about all the Mercury, Apollo, Spacelab & Shuttle flights? Shouldn't that sign read Spaceship 1, Government 120??? Rutan also has a cheek with regard to development. He knew what he was getting in to, thanks to the government funded space program. Back in the 1950s & 1960s no one knew for sure & progress was hesitant. If he hates government so much for being so "slow" one assumes that he can show how he simply ignored all this work & found it all out for himself, to show how it can be done "properly"???? So how about the advances in materials & computing stemming from government space programs? Did he start from scratch there too? This is where Rutan undermines & devalues his own genius. While he has achieved & continues to achieve much his attitude shows that he is arrogant & full of self importance. He sets up Straw Men to knock down & then crows about his talent.And in the end if privateers such as Rutan are the future of space & they can do it all better, blah blah blah, why aren't they? Who has put a satellite into space? Who has even done one orbit? No one, unless they buy cheap launchers that stemmed from government programs (such Sea Launch). No one has started from scratch, designed & built a launcher & sent it into orbit.If Rutan is right then private operators would have done this years ago. Right? And they'd have built their own launchers. Right? Oh & when he finally (or "If") he ever gets an object into orbit let's see how his design fares with re-entry. Folding the wings will not work then, despite Rutan's ego there will be a lot of heat generated & that will need to be either resisted (like the Space Shuttle) or dissipated (like ablative heat shields). maybe then we will see what Rutan is really made of.

bswapp686 Caution: If you watch this you may be exposed to hardly imaginable exploits of ordinary people which may cause outbursts of emotion.I watched this with the father of one of the team members. I watched both the original flight and the X-game winning run. To watch this humble team go through the steps they took to achieve Mr. Ratan's dream brought out emotions in me not usually evoked. I was actually watching a dream of mine come true, except in proxy.I now have a dream that Mr. Ratan will improve and enhance spaceflight, as he displayed in the NG video wherein the common person could vacation in his space station or be awed by simply traveling there. Of these things have I dreamt to be a part of since my childhood.

Freycinet This documentary about the development of SpaceshipOne, the Burt Rutan rocket-plane that broke the 100 km. altitude barrier and claimed the X-prize, is a fabulous, exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the whole project.Burt Rutan said - in a speech after the final SpaceshipOne flight - that the whole flight crew had actually watched this documentary the night before the flight, and had been very touched by it. The Discovery Channel film crew got exclusive access to the project, and it certainly shows that nothing was hidden to them.Presented in a quick almost music-video-like pace, the documentary doesn't delve into much technical detail, but rather goes for an emotional impact, through the interviews with the protagonists: engineers, pilots, their families and Mr. Rutan himself. With great frankness they discuss their aspirations and fears, and really manage to transmit the entrepreneurial spirit and "frontier" mentality that was the backbone of the project. Also, the fears of the relatives of the test pilots come through in some rather emotional parts of the documentary.The SpaceshipOne flights looked rather effortless on TV, but in "Black Sky" we get to see that, well, it wasn't all that simple to strap a big huge rocket to the back of a man, and propel him into the stratosphere! Cockpit views during flight makes it clear that it took a lot of guts to get into SpaceshipOne, a real pilot's plane with only the minimum of instrumentation to keep it light. There were some harrowing moments during the trial flights, and it is all told in nail-biting detail.For an exciting and touching documentary about the SpaceshipOne project, this is the one to watch.Another documentary, called "Winning the X-prize", is the follow-up to this one, and deals with the two SpaceshipOne flights that actually took the X-prize home. That one is made by the same Discovery Channel crew, and is great as well.