Linkshoch Wonderful Movie

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Matho The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

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.

melvin-1 Burt Ruttan was a genius to see the recovery needed no plane or parachute just folding the wing into a feather mode to slow the drag until a subsonic mode and unfolding the wing and a glide to land. Every else thought of heat he knew how to counter that. That's how he won the X prize.Now that SpaceShip One is a sub-orbital ship with 1 man the need to create a cabin with a low weight material that weights less than steel for a stronger body and wings. Now they need to have better material for the windows they need to have a interior foil material to protect the civilians in space too. All Burt Rutan needs to get that in space by doubling the rockets power, adding a computer for calculating GPS mapping and pressurision to make a orbital flight. I loved how Burt Ruttan made some risks where more were more careful. They thought of the way we recovered past space missions and he took the way that the X-15 and Space Shuttle failed and decided to scrap the rocket plane and use a low drag method to land.NASA should take this idea as a safety recovery for the ISS Space Station and include it in the Shuttle in case it failed in space and a safe crew recovery needed.

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.