Burt Rutan spent years working out a wing that folds 70 degrees up on a hinge, so the thing falls like a shuttlecock rather than a pilot fighting to hold an attitude. Forty-seven years after Lyra's beeping sphere, in 2004, that came out of a hangar in Mojave slung under White Knight, the pair of them just specks against the blue in the photo. Most of aerospace is over my head, but I understand a hinge.
Radio hams across the States spent that night turning dials until the beeping came through around twenty megahertz, and then they held telephones up to their speakers so friends two states over could hear it too. Nobody needed a telescope.…
White Knight carried it up to roughly fourteen kilometres before letting go, Wendell, and the rocket motor burned for only about eighty seconds after that. Most of the trip was coasting, like a train running on a long gradient with the regulator shut.
Binnie took it to about 112 km on the prize flight, call it twelve km above the line they needed. Three minutes of weightlessness up top, enough time to let a pen drift and watch it. The hinge is the clever bit though, Wendell — it does the work a whole control system would otherwise have to.